Agroecology is an area that both presents significant challenges and significant opportunities for theoretical work. This symposium will review the challenges and opportunities through discussion of past progress and future directions. Thus, the key idea behind this symposium is that this interplay between agroecology and ecological theory is a two way street: high quality theory can and should play a role in agricultural decisions and both the questions and data available from agriculture should lead to new fundamental advances in ecological theory that will apply both to agricultural and other systems. Additionally, agricultural practices which have developed over many years may themselves provide important insights into ecological theory. With the increasing recognition that virtually all ecological systems are heavily influenced by humans, explicitly studying systems developed by humans is obviously a very useful pathway. The talks in the symposium have been carefully chosen to cover a range of agricultural systems and to illustrate both potential contributions of ecological theory to agriculture and the importance of both the possibility of experiments on a scale only possible as agriculture as well as different fundamental theoretical questions that arise.