Johann-Heinrich-von-Thünen-Medal in Gold

The Alfred Toepfer Foundation F.V.S. stopped awarding the Thünen Medal in 2005 and replaced it in 2007 with the newly created Cultura Award. The Agricultural
and Nutritional Sciences Faculty awards the Thünen Medal on its own as of 2009.

The prize curatorship consists of six members. The Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences of the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel appoints three members from among its full-time professors in addition to the respective dean. The other members are appointed by the Faculty on the recommendation of the Board of Trustees. At least two members of the board of trustees should be practical farmers.

Johann Heinrich von Thünen

(June 24, 1783 to September 22, 1850)

Johann Heinrich von Thünen was born on June 24, 1783, in Kanarienhausen near Hooksiel in Jeverland. He attended Lucas Andreas Staudinger's agricultural training school in Holstein, where he demonstrated fundamental ideas as early as 1803 on a term paper, which he later developed into a seminal work of national economics as a practical farmer on the Tellow estate in Mecklenburg from 1810 to 1850).

His teacher and friend Staudinger accompanied his work and ensured that Thuenen's work "The Isolated State in Relation to Agriculture and National Economy" was published as Part 1 in Hamburg in 1826. Four years later, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Rostock.

In his work Thuenen shows the optimal supply of the population with economic goods and thus at the same time the expedient location and the optimal production intensity of the individual branches of the economy. In his assumptions, the arrangement of the directions of production takes place around the point of sale in the so-called "Thünen circles". They are arranged according to the transport costs per unit of area and distance around the market. Thünen's method is primarily that of isolating abstraction.

The 2nd part of the "isolating state" was published in 1850. Particularly noteworthy from this are the statements on the natural remuneration of workers contained in his wage formula. These statements also show Thünen's social attitude in particular.

With his work, Thuenen founded important research institutions in the economic and social sciences, such as farm economics and econometrics, agricultural, urban and forestry location theory, marginal analysis, marginal productivity theory, economic optimization, total model calculation, and theories on political and social statements about natural wages and profit sharing.

He died on September 22, 1850 on his Tellow estate as a practical farmer and is today considered the most important German economist of his time

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

Liste der Preisträger

1966 bis 1969

1970 bis 1979

1980 bis 1989

1990 bis 1999

2000 bis 2014

ab 2015