Some dairy farmers look at their employees as a cost factor, which needs to be kept minimal. Others see their employees as a resource. With proper management, employees can help keep a farm successful in the long run. How a farmer looks at his or her employees determines how employees will be managed and what role labor will play on a farm. If you are the kind of farmer who sees employees as a ...

A malaria control pilot project was developed in the Urupá agro-industrial farm that is situated in the State of Rondônia (Western Amazon Region, Brazil). Around 180 inhabitants had been surveyed for the past five years. The control measures were based on (1) training a community agent to perform on the spot microscopical diagnosis of malaria and to treat the uncomplicated cases of malaria; (2)...

OBJECTIVES To describe all terrain vehicle (ATV) ownership, access, use, and safety behaviours in rural Manitoba children. METHODS Questionnaire administered to a convenience sample of grade 6 students attending an agricultural fair. RESULTS 162 grade 6 children participated. The mean age was 11.4 years, and 46% were male. 125 students (77%) reported having access to ATVs, including 69 four...

There is growing interest in using environmental taxes to address the problems of agricultural pesticide contamination, given the potential of economic instruments for higher eciency compared to regulatory approaches. However, research to date has suggested low producer responsiveness to input price changes. It is important to examine crop protection decisions and the options for adjustment in...

BACKGROUND In early 2009, a dairy-goat annex care farm in South Limburg, the Netherlands, reported 220 Coxiella burnetii-related abortions in 450 pregnant goats. These preceded human cases and occurred in a region that was Q-fever free before 2009, providing a unique quasi-experimental setting for investigating regional transmission patterns associated with a Q-fever point source. METHODS Ind...

Besides the classification performance, the training time is a second important factor that affects the suitability of a classification algorithm regarding an unknown dataset. An algorithm with a slightly lower accuracy is maybe preferred if its training time is significantly lower. Additionally, an estimation of the required training time of a pattern recognition task is very useful if the res...

Two commercial Midwestern egg-type chicken flocks experienced significant increases in mortality rates in April 2013 with clinical signs appearing in 17-week-old pullets in Farm A and in 46-week-old hens in Farm B. Average weekly mortality was 0.44% over a 4-week period in Farm A and 0.17% over an 8-week period in Farm B. On Farm A, flocks in the affected house had a 45% decrease in daily egg p...

Ted Keen, a farmer from Wilson County, lost his life when a tractor trailer truck traveling 70 miles per hour rear-ended his tractor in the spring of 2003. This incident was the catalyst for addressing the issue of highway safety with farm equipment. Research data also indicated that this was a need for farmers in Wilson and the surrounding counties. The University of North Carolina Highway Saf...