By Stephanie Schupska
University of Georgia

Terence J. Centner, a University of Georgia professor of agricultural and applied economics, received the D.W. Brooks Faculty Award for Excellence in Research Oct. 2 in Athens, Ga.

The award includes a framed certificate and $5,000. It’s given in honor of D.W. Brooks, founder of Gold Kist Inc. and Cotton States Mutual Insurance Companies. Brooks was an advisor on agriculture and trade issues to seven U.S. presidents.

Other D.W. Brooks honorees this year are Adam Davis in teaching, Peggy Bledsoe in public service extension and Dan Horton in extension.

Centner teaches three dual-level law courses and is an undergraduate coordinator and prelaw advisor in the UGA College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. His research focuses on agricultural and environmental policy issues and analysis of problems that affect farmers’ and firms’ profitability.

Centner’s research has led to many changes in laws and regulations. One of the biggest involved protecting Vidalia onions against counterfeiters. He helped secure federal trademark protection for the onions through a certification mark denoting regional origin.

Research on antinuisance protection helped in revising the Georgia Right-to-Farm Law, curbing nuisance lawsuits against farmers and agribusinesses.

His book, “Empty Pastures,” probes the changes taking place in rural landscapes. The dwindling U.S. numbers of livestock, he says, are signs of a broader transformation with serious consequences for rural America.

Centner has shared his agricultural law and applied policy research with more than 50 audiences in 25 countries. He was president of the American Agricultural Law Association and the American chair of the Second Anglo-American Agricultural Law Symposium. The American Agricultural Law Association gave him their Professional Scholarship Award.

Centner earned a B.S. with distinction from Cornell University, a J.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo and an LL.D. from the University of Arkansas.

In 1990, he conducted research as an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Goettingen. In 2001, he taught as a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the University of Mannheim.