Allen Featherstone

Allen M. Featherstone was appointed at Kansas State in 1986. His primary responsibilities have been teaching and research. In addition, he directed the on-campus Masters and Ph.D. program for 9 years and the distance graduate program since its inception. He began serving as Department Head in October 2013, he also served in this role from October 2009 to August 2010.

Featherstone was instrumental in developing the award-winning Master of Agribusiness distance education program. Launched in 1998, it was the first graduate agribusiness program in the United States to be offered through distance education and allows agribusiness professionals around the world to earn an advanced degree without career interruption. It currently has students and alumni from 40 states and 30 other nations.

Due to the increasing global nature of agriculture, Featherstone worked to create the Comparative Food and Agriculture Systems course to give students first-hand knowledge of agriculture and cultural situations in other parts of the world. The course is team-taught by instructors in seven different regions from: Russia, Mercosur, the European Union, East Asia, Oceania, South Asia and sub-Sahara Africa.

As a leading agriculture finance scholar, he has studied land markets, investment decisions, mergers in the financial services industry, the probability of agricultural loan default and loan loss severity, the influence of taxes on farmland, and alternative federal tax systems. His production economics research has investigated issues such as ground water allocation in irrigated crop production, comparison of returns under alternative tillage systems, the costs of risk, interactions of weather soils, and management on corn yields, analysis of the returns to farm equity and assets, and analysis of the optimizing behavior of Kansas farmers, examining the stability of estimates using duality, and examining the application of a new functional forms for estimating production relationships.