James Anderson Scott Watson

Sir James Anderson Scott Watson KB CBE FRSE MC LLD (16 November 1889–1966) was a 20th-century Scottish agriculturalist.

Watson was born on 16 November 1889 in Forfar, the son of William Watson a farmer at Downieken near Dundee. He studied science at the University of Edinburgh graduating with a BSc in 1908. He then went to the United States to study agriculture at the University of Iowa, gaining an MSc in 1910.

He began lecturing in agriculture at the University of Edinburgh in 1911, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His proposers were Robert Wallace, James Cossar Ewart, Sir Thomas Hudson Beare, and Robert Stewart MacDougall.

In the World War I he served in the Lothian and Border Horse Yeomanry for a year and was then commissioned at the rank of 2nd Lieutenant into the Royal Field Artillery where he won the Military Cross for bravery.

In 1922 he became Britain's first ever Professor of Agriculture (still at University of Edinburgh). In 1925 he transferred to be the Sibthorpian Professor of Rural Economy at the University of Oxford replacing Professor William Somerville. He retired in 1944 and was succeeded at Oxford by Prof Geoffrey Blackman.

On 15 July 1949 he was knighted (KB) by King George VI for services to agriculture.

He died in 1966.

• The History of the Agricultural Society of England 1839-1939 (1946)
• Great Farmers (1951)
• Agriculture in the British Economy (1956)
• Agriculture: The Science and Practice of British Farming
• Evolution
• Heredity
• The Farming Year