In 1840, at the initiative of Cosimo Ridolfi, an agrarian institute was founded in Pisa, which in 1870 became a section of the Faculty of Natural Sciences under the name of Pisa Agricultural School. During the first half of the 20th century, the School became the Higher Institute of Agrarian Science and, in 1935, the Faculty of Agrarian Science. In the Seventies the Institutes of Plant Pathology and Zooculture were established. In 1991 the Department of Agronomy and Agricultural Ecosystem Management was instituted.

The Department has an agronomy collection and an agricultural mechanics one. The former is composed of 95 models of agricultural tools in wood and metal, constructed for educational purposes between the mid-19th and the early 20th centuries, and commissioned directly by the professors. The collections also include some original agricultural tools from the same period. The agricultural mechanics collection includes 80 scale models, used in teaching, of agricultural tractors and processing machines, dating from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.