In February 2016, the 60th Annual Conference of the Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society (AARES) was held in Canberra, 20 years since we added ‘and Resources’ to the Society's name and Journal. As one way of commemorating those anniversaries, a pre‐Conference workshop was held to highlight the contributions of the Society's agricultural and resource economists. Papers were solicited with the expectation that they would be presented in a way that is accessible for the broad membership of the Society and that revisions would be published along with reviewer comments in the Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics (AJARE). This Special Issue is the upshot. This article introduces the Issue and the other articles in it.