Many agricultural economists are not familiar with case study research, yet the approach is a useful means of collecting data, and building and testing theory. Case study research has a prescribed set of objectives, epistemology, methodology, and methods that have been developed and tested in a wide range of scholarly and pragmatic situations. This paper reviews these fundamentals, and then demonstrates the case study approach within the context of an agribusiness research project. This application exemplifies how case study research is capable of generating a robust, comprehensive array of "knowledge" about complex, highly inter-dependent and dynamic social phenomena.