was made for him in the Department of General Economics and the School of Commerce to teach economic geography and economic history. However, as he later noted there was nothing in the budget to provide for his area of interest, agricultural economics. Ely suggested that he simply teach the given courses and slowly develop work on agricultural economics. Upon approaching the dean with the idea, he was told there would be no place for such courses for the next ten years. Nevertheless, by the winter of 1902–03, Ely had arranged for fourteen lectures to be given to agricultural students on the economics of farm management. The dean was impressed by the prepared syllabus and eventually Taylor set up an agricultural economics course for four-year students. He devoted himself by 1903 to founding a Department of Agricultural Economics at the university for both research and teaching. Taylor wrote the first agricultural economics textbook in the United States in 1905. He also adapted a dot map system with William J. Spillman to show historical shifts in agricultural production. By 1909 he was successful in creating the new department, the first devoted to agricultural economics in the United States. By this time he had also broadened the scope of the field to include rural sociology. In 1910 he authored the first Wisconsin Experiment Station bulletin on agricultural economics, on the Methods of Renting Farm Lands in Wisconsin. Taylor also worked with the Wisconsin state government after being spurred on by Charles McCarthy, an advocate of cooperation between the government, farmers, and universities. Wisconsin's new Department of Agriculture was asked to provide leadership in improving the marketing of dairy as the state was seeing a recent shift toward greater milk production. Taylor used this as an opportunity to secure funding from the government to create a new faculty position for marketing. For this, he invited his long-time friend and head of the Department of Economics at Iowa State College Benjamin Horace Hibbard. He joined the department in 1913 to become its second faculty member. Taylor was also a founding member of the Farm Management Association, which later became the American Farm Economic Association. He served as its president in 1920. Government career From 1909 to 1910 he assisted the Bureau of the Census to plan its schedule for the agricultural census, as well as for a special census of plantations. Taylor chose to join