About

Dr. Sarah Low has been serving as professor and head of the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics in the College of ACES at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign since August 2022. Prior to this role, she held the Fred V. Heinkel Chair in Agriculture within the Division of Applied Social Sciences at the University of Missouri. Before beginning her academic career, Dr. Low spent ten years at the USDA’s Economic Research Service in Washington, D.C. Her research and Extension work emphasize supporting and facilitating regional economic development, with a focus on policy-relevant issues informed by her federal government experience. She conducts research and outreach in areas related to agricultural and rural development policy in the U.S., including broadband internet access and adoption, business dynamics and survival, financial capital availability, value-added agriculture, spatial analysis, and entrepreneurship as a rural economic development strategy. Dr. Low grew up in rural Scotland and was inspired by the prospect of economic mobility in the U.S., which motivated her interest in improving rural livelihoods through research and policy. Her first job after graduate school was in the economic research division at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, within their Center for the Study of Rural America. She is a Fellow of the Regional Science Association International and has held leadership roles such as immediate past-chair of the North American Regional Science Council of the Regional Science Association International, president of the Southern Regional Science Association, and chair of the Community and Regional Economics Network (CRENET). She also serves as an elected Director of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, where she participates in the Access Task Force and Employment Services Committee and chairs the CHAIRS section. Additionally, she is an External Research Associate with Colorado State University’s Regional Economic Development Institute (REDI) and an Editor of Global Challenges in Regional Science, a journal of the European Regional Science Association. Outside of her professional work, Dr. Low enjoys spending time with her husband and son on the water and training and competing with her Belgian Sheepdogs.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Economics
• Business
• Marketing
• Environmental economics
• Telecommunications
• Demographic economics
• Finance
• Agricultural economics
• Economic growth
• Industrial organization
• Geography

Selected publications

• The Value of Economic and Community Development Anchors

  Economic Development Quarterly · 2025-11-25

  articleSenior author

  Economic developers and planners can use more than anchor tenants and place-bound anchor institutions to secure development, but not all anchors are equally durable. Place-bound, or place-rooted, anchor institutions are unlikely to relocate in response to changes in settlement patterns or business consolidations, providing a strong foundation for community development. However, anchor institutions are scarce. In contrast, most community development investments are tethered to more plentiful, but more ephemeral, anchors: anchor tenants, third places, and managed or naturally occurring third spaces. Ensuring that the right anchor is used on a particular water's bottom—the specific land use and geographic scale of a project's impact—requires understanding which anchor best secures a development or regional economy. A survey of agricultural extension agents revealed that the strength of an anchor comes from its community and economic VALUE: visibility, authenticity, loyalty, utility, and engagement.

  PublisherDOI

• Vendor Types, Attendance, Experience and Sales 2019–2021: Evidence From Five Rural Oregon Farmers Markets

  Agribusiness · 2025-05-14 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  ABSTRACT Farmers markets provide a direct‐to‐consumer marketing path for farmers and small businesses, facilitating customer discovery and product refinement. This paper explores farmers markets as a business incubator, with a focus on beginning vendors and resilience to a shock, namely, COVID‐19 market restrictions. We investigate how vendor sales vary by the type of products a vendor sells (farm products, processed food, and crafts/art), their attendance, market experience and the presence of COVID‐19 restrictions. We use a unique dataset of 9,371 sales observations from 399 vendors at five small to medium‐sized farmers markets in rural Oregon from 2019 to 2021. We estimate that beginning vendors have, on average, 11% lower sales than established vendors, holding other factors constant. Vendors’ sales, on average, were higher with higher market attendance. Results suggest that farm product vendors have higher sales than processed food and craft and art vendors, larger crowds encourage higher sales, and rainfall lowers sales, all else equal. Individual market day average vendor sales were, on average, 8.9% higher during days with COVID‐19 market restrictions than during days without restrictions, which was likely driven by experienced farm vendors.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Stakeholders in local public participation

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2025-08-07

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Editorial

  Global challenges & regional science. · 2025-03-01 · 1 citations

  editorialOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Issue Information

  Growth and Change · 2024-06-04

  paratextOpen access

  No abstract is available for this article.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A Skills Gap Analysis of Farmer Directors of US Farmer Cooperatives

  Agribusiness · 2024-11-19 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  ABSTRACT Boards of directors are vital to firm performance and are an integral part of the decision‐making process of any business. Several studies have been conducted that observe corporate or nonprofit board characteristics, skills, and the board's connection to firm performance. In the cooperative space, the literature has focused on exploring the impact directors have on governance and policy. Only a few studies have examined director skills. The present study adds to this literature by identifying the skill gaps for directors of US farmer cooperatives, and what skills are most important for a director to possess. We found that the largest skill gaps were in cooperative governance and policy and cooperative finance. Time management was found to be the least important skill for directors to possess. Asking critical questions, strategic planning, and understanding current economic and industry conditions were consistently among the top three skills.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Issue Information

  Growth and Change · 2023-03-01

  paratextOpen access

  No abstract is available for this article.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Evaluating the impact of broadband access and internet use in a small underserved rural community

  Telecommunications Policy · 2023-01-13 · 54 citations

  articleOpen access

  Having adequate access to the internet at home enhances quality-of-life for households and facilitates economic and social opportunities. Despite increased investment in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of households in the rural United States still lack adequate access to high-speed internet. In this study, we evaluate a wireless broadband network deployed in Turney, a small, underserved rural community in northwest Missouri. In addition to collecting survey data before and after this internet intervention, we collected pre-treatment and post-treatment survey data from comparison communities to serve as a control group. Due to technical constraints, some of Turney's interested participants could not connect to the network, creating an additional comparison group. These comparisons suggest two primary findings, (1) changes in using the internet for employment, education, and health could not be directly attributed to the internet intervention, and (2) the internet intervention was associated with benefits stemming from the ability to use multiple devices at once. This study has implications for the design of future broadband evaluation studies, particularly those examining underserved rather than unserved communities. Recommendations for identifying appropriate outcome variables, executing recruitment strategies, and selecting the timing of surveys are made.

  PublisherDOI

• A qualitative assessment of farmer director skills in agricultural cooperatives

  The International Food and Agribusiness Management Review · 2023-06-22 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Agricultural cooperatives in the United States are larger and more complex than ever before. Due to this growth, farmer directors need to up-skill to maximize farmer member benefits. Director education is generally considered a successful strategy for improving financial and strategic performance, yet little research has examined the skills U.S. agricultural cooperative directors need. This research identified skills – and, notably, behaviors – necessary for agricultural cooperative directors to ensure financial and operational success. Interviews and focus groups were conducted with cooperative leaders. Results were consistent across these three groups and suggest that successful directors must possess the following skills and behaviors: financial/ business, governance, board leadership, industry knowledge and strategic planning. Results suggest that educating farmer directors on these skills and behaviors may benefit all farmer members of an agricultural cooperative.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Issue Information

  Growth and Change · 2023-06-01

  paratextOpen access

  No abstract is available for this article.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Dawn Thilmany

  25 shared

• Elizabeth Canales

  Mississippi State University

  16 shared

• Kathryn A. Boys

  North Carolina State University

  16 shared

• Catherine Isley

  Contextual Change (United States)

  11 shared

• Stephan Weiler

  8 shared

• Anders Van Sandt

  8 shared

• Stephen J. Vogel

  8 shared

• Tessa Conroy

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  7 shared

Education

• PhD, Agricultural and Consumer Economics

  University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

• Public Service and Administration in Agriculture, Sociology

  Iowa State University

• M.S., Agricultural Economics

  Purdue University