Tobie Blanchard

Lawson Connor describes himself as an intense cricket player. A native of the Caribbean Island of Antigua, Connor hasn’t found a cricket crew in south Louisiana, but he is finding his stride in the LSU AgCenter Department of Agricultural Economics and Agribusiness.

Connor started with the department in September of 2018. His work centers on production economics with a focus on crop insurance.

“In one project we are investigating the methods behind premium ratings as they apply to the Delta area,” Connor said.

He said in the past 30 years or so, farmers in the Delta have made changes in the crops they grow, such as putting more acres into soybeans. Farming methods and practices have also evolved. Through his research, Connor wants to determine if the current rating system lags farmer performance.

“Speculation is farmers are paying for risks that don’t need to be covered anymore,” he said.

Saving farmers money on insurance premiums while getting them the same level of coverage is Connor’s ultimate objective.

He also is studying the relationship between sustainable agriculture and crop insurance. He is working to ascertain if farmers adopt sustainable practices that lower their risks, if those benefits can be reflected in lower crop insurance premiums.

Connor hopes lower premiums will encourage farmers to incorporate more conservation practices.

“The current concern is crop insurance may substitute for some of those, so we want to internalize some of those sustainable decisions,” Connor said.

Connor said he has a keen interest in the relationship between agriculture and the natural environment and believes there is a strong need for research to reflect that relationship.

Connor’s path into economics wasn’t a straight one. He majored in chemistry at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. The school’s liberal arts curriculum led him to economics courses.

“I had always done science, so in liberal arts you have to take an eclectic mix of subjects, and economics was one that stuck out to me as closer to the science way of thinking.”

One of those courses included agricultural yield modeling, and he said that really sparked his interest in agricultural economics. Connor got his chemistry degree but went on to study agricultural economics at North Carolina State University, where he received his master’s and Ph.D.

Connor has charted a path across the continent and halfway back. Before his time at Macalester, he attended a two-year pre-university school in British Columbia, Canada. The lush landscape full of wildlife was a new world to him.

An avid runner and collegiate sprinter, Connor would do adventure runs as part of his outdoor activity requirements.

“One of the better ones we did was a trail that took us over a bridge with a cascading waterfall, and if you kept going it was the spawning area for the salmon, so you would see eagles and bears around as well,” he said.

Connor made the most of his time in the north but after a few years of living with snow, he decided to head south.

He said in looking for a job, he was looking for a climate similar to where he grew up. He found it in Louisiana. And while he hasn’t found a cricket league, Connor is hoping to take on good old American flag football as his next athletic challenge.

Tobie Blanchard is assistant director of LSU AgCenter Communications and communications coordinator for the College of Agriculture.

(This article appears in the summer 2019 issue of Louisiana Agriculture.)

Lawson Connor is co-author of an article in the summer 2019 issue. Go to “Accurate Field Forecasts through Machine Learning.”

Connor, center, was involved in the community garden project while in graduate school at North Carolina State University and received a grant from the local YMCA to get the project started. Photo provided by Connor