Risk and uncertainty have been extensively studied by agricultural economists. In this paper we question some practices and beliefs which arc common among agricultural economists. The most important of these arc (a) the predominant use of static (strategic) frameworks to formally analyse risk, (b) the predominant focus on risk aversion as the motivation for considering risk, (c) the idea that stochastic (i.e. explicitly probabilistic) models are likely to he helpful to farmers in their decision making and (d) the idea that study of risk in agriculture is likely to he an area of especially high social returns.