Retirement: Karen Klonsky

Karen Klonsky, UC ANR Cooperative Extension specialist in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at UC Davis, retired in July after 34 years.

Klonsky joined UC in 1981. In a Q&A published in Pacific Nut Producer,the New York native talks about how she became interested in agriculture and went on to study at Michigan State University.

In 1983, she began directing development of UC's agricultural production cost and return studies.

“Those were not university costs,” Klonsky told reporter Patrick Cavanaugh. “The farmers tell us what equipment they will use, and then we calculate the cost of using their equipment—the fuel used to operate the equipment and the repair costs—with an agriculture-engineering program.”

In addition to cost studies, Klonsky's research has focused on the economic feasibility of sustainable and organic agricultural production.

“Most of my important collaborations were conducting trials with people in other disciplines,” Klonsky said. “For instance, at Russell Ranch, I was the only economist involved in the collaboration with plant pathologists and pomologists who ran trials to discover fumigation alternatives in the preplanting of trees.”

Read the full article at http://californiaagtoday.com/ucs-karen-klonsky-retires.

The production cost and return studies are continuing under the direction of Daniel Sumner, director of ANR's Agricultural Issues Center, and Donald Stewart, staff research associate. Current and past studies are online at http://coststudies.ucdavis.edu/en.

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