- Vice President
Dr. Keith H. Coble serves as the Vice President of the Division of Agriculture, Forestry and Veterinary Medicine (DAFVM) at Mississippi State University. The Division is central to MSU’s longstanding land-grant mission: research, teaching, and service. DAFVM faculty, staff, and students work to maintain our outstanding national reputation in a wide range of subject areas.
DAFVM includes six major units: Colleges of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Forest Resources, and Veterinary Medicine, plus the Mississippi Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station, the Forest and Wildlife Research Center, and the MSU Extension Service. The Division encompasses four off-campus Research and Extension Centers, four CVM Diagnostic Labs, 16 Branch Experiment Stations, 82 County Extension Offices, and 1,500 employees.
Coble is a first-generation college graduate. He grew up on a livestock farm in southern Missouri and was active in 4-H and FFA before receiving his B.S. degree in agricultural education from the University of Missouri. While teaching high school agriculture, he obtained his M.S. degree. He obtained his Ph.D. in agricultural economics from Texas A&M University in 1993. He then worked at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service before joining the MSU Department of Agricultural Economics faculty in 1997. As a faculty member, Coble held a three-way teaching/research/Extension appointment. In 2013-2014 Coble served as a Chief Economist for the U.S. Senate Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Committee. He began serving as head of the MSU Department of Agricultural Economics in 2016 and continued in that role until his appointment as DAFVM vice president.
In 2009 he was named a W.L. Giles Distinguished Professor at the University, an award reserved for those with a record of outstanding research, teaching, and service. In 2012 Coble received a Southeastern Conference Faculty Achievement Award.
Within his profession, Coble has been elected twice as a leader of his professional society, first as a member of the Board of Directors and then as President of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA) 2019-2020. In 2020, Coble was honored with the Southern Agricultural Economics Association Lifetime Achievement Award.
Coble has published more than 95 scientific research journal articles and 160 scientific conference papers addressing risk management, farm policy, insurance, and agricultural data analytics. He was named to the USDA Advisory Committee on Agriculture Statistics for 2020-2022. Coble is also a member of the Ag Data Coalition Board of Directors.
Dr. Coble is supported by his wife Kim (an animal science major) and his three grown children, Kenton, Kara, and Kelly.
You can follow him on Twitter at @DrKeIthHCoble.
