rice is one of the most important staple cereals‏ ‏in iran and has a main role in providing ‎the food ‎security. harvesting by hand postpone the rice harvesting stage, and facing late season ‎rainfall, and increase of yield losses during harvesting. to determine the most suitable ‎harvesting method in gilan, three different harvesting methods (by hand, harvester and ‎combine) were considered as...

Introduction The transition from on-farm to industrial-scale livestock and poultry production in the United States has increased the social stress at the rural-urban interface as a result of actual environmental impairments, perceived increases in environmental risk, demographic and cultural shifts within agricultural communities and disillusionment with the nature of the economic growth that h...

This study estimates the prevalence of key livestock diseases in district Faisalabad and evaluates the effects they have on livestock productivity and farm incomes. Particular focus of the study is on the negative consequences on milk production and farm incomes due to mastitis, Parturient Hemoglobinuria, Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD), and tick infestations. The economic losses associated with t...

During the 1980’s collective action was initiated with the purpose of saving the remnants of traditional livestock farming in Jämtland. This led to the articulation of a local agro-food system (LAFS) that managed to commercialize important elements of traditional agriculture by adding elements of modernity. Farm diversification was an important strategy that led to the forward integration of fa...

The increasing presence of aquaculture in coastal waters calls for a better understanding of its environmental effects. Currently little information is available on the impact of shellfish farms on cetaceans. Here we compare long-term ranging patterns of adult female bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops sp. in Shark Bay, Western Australia) before and during full-scale pearl oyster farming operations, ...

The paper describes the hierarchical control concept for wind farm power/load optimization with emphasis on compensation of disturbances. The control concept was developed for the EU-FP7 project Distributed Control of Large-Scale Offshore Wind Farms – Aeolus. The Aeolus project approaches the wind farm control problem by considering wind turbines in a wind farm as individual power actuators aff...

Land redistribution was legislated in 1994; it was designed to resolve historical imbalances inland ownership in South Africa. Between 2002 and 2006, a longitudinal observational studywas conducted with 15 purposively selected small-scale dairy farmers in a land redistributionproject in Central North West Province. Four farmers left the project over the period. For thepurposes of this study, a ...

China’s agricultural sector faces challenges because most farms are still small scale. China’s policy is to encourage the consolidation of farms and promote farms that are larger in scale. A question that arises is: Are China ’s farms growing? The goal of the present paper is to determine whether large farms in China have emerged or if farms remain small. To meet this goal, we systematically do...

There is growing evidence that low-cost open-source 3-D printers can reduce costs by enabling distributed manufacturing of substitutes for both specialty equipment and conventional mass-manufactured products. The rate of 3-D printable designs under open licenses is growing exponentially and there are already hundreds of designs applicable to small-scale organic farming. It has also been hypothe...