The objective of this presentation will be to relate field experiences regarding the impact of gilt age and lactation length on sow productivity. Over time the largest percentage of females to farrow within a herd are parity one and therefore overall herd productivity is greatly influenced by the results achieved by them. Gilt age and weight at first service have a direct impact on these result...

A farm operator household time-allocation model and data from the Farm Costs and Returns Survey and from other sources were used to derive off-farm wage equations for U.S. farm operators based on production region, size of farm, and farm type. These equations, in turn, were used to impute opportunity costs for farm operators' unpaid labor. Using this new method, instead of the ad hoc method of ...

In this paper, we describe a novel execution environment that can dynamically switch between garbage collection systems. As such, it enables selection of the most appropriate allocator and collector for a given application and underlying resource availability. Our system is novel in that it is able to switch between a wide range of diverse collection systems. It uses program annotations to guid...

Lack of access to formal insurance market may prevent farmers from pursuing risky production activities with potentially large returns. How does access to formal microinsurance affect production and economic development? We report results from a large randomized field experiment conducted in southwestern China in the context of a subsidized insurance for sows. We induce exogenous variation in i...

A formal, general model of program dependences is presented and used to evaluate several dependence-based software testing, debugging, and maintenance techniques. Two generalizations of control and data flow dependence, called weak and strong syntactic dependence, are introduced and related to a concept called semantic dependence. Semantic dependence models the ability of a program statement to...

A 100-sow farrow-to-feeder farm with an outdoor gestation lot had a 4-year history of ring-like skin lesions in lactating sows. On average, 90% of sows in each 5-week batch developed lesions within a week of entering the farrowing house. Lesions beginning as 2to 3-cm circles of dark, crusty skin coalesced into larger areas on the back, sides, and ventral abdomen. No etiologic agent was identifi...

To understand the different selection procedures used in Germany it is necessary to explain the structure of pig breeding and production. The commercial fattening pigs are either produced by traditional herdbook organisations or by commercial breeding companies. While in Bavaria 90 % of all fattening pigs are single crosses with Pietrain as sire and Landrace as dam, in the northern part of Germ...

Article history: Received 31 August 2009 Received in revised form 8 July 2011 Accepted 18 July 2011 Available online 22 August 2011 This paper tests whether financial constraints play a disciplinary role in cash dissipation in the presence of agency problems. We hypothesize that when firms have difficulty raising external funds, empire-building managers of cash-rich firms will be less likely to...

Decision Support Systems are well known in higher education for multiple purposes, such as to conjugate data and intelligence, to achieve the best and possible solutions, and to adjust decisions under uncertainty. The optimality of discrete decisions (e.g., yes/no?) on uncertain environment is aimed in a Multivariate Analysis and Decision Support course: multivariate data is required, collected...