Agriculture is the world’s largest industry, continues to dominate human land use, and will become more intensive to meet global food demands associated with population growth. Sustainability of global agricultural systems will require strategic integration of conservation practices to protect ecosystems services, health, and productivity. Natural communities as a component of agricultural land...

The location of first generation processing plants for biogas using bulky inputs is a prominent example of locational decisions of plants that face high per unit transport costs of feedstock and simultaneously depend to a large extent on feedstock availability. Modelling the resulting regional feedstock markets then requires a spatially explicit representation of demand. With production capacit...

Modern genetics has shown the power of modifying microbes, from viruses to bacteria to algae, to produce desirable agricultural products. Nevertheless, gene additions or modification have led to relatively few products in the marketplace due partly to costs of regulation, but also to the challenges of production, delivery and application. Some products with gene loss have been marketed, notably...

this study aimed at identifying components of the household health costs.this study was a qualitative research conducted in two main phases. the first phase consisted of interviews with sample households selected in eight provinces of iran. they were to identify components of the household health costs. in the second phase, components were determined as direct, indirect and intangible based on ...

Most current research on winter wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) focuses on increasing yields of either grain or plant biomass. Increased production costs and environmental awareness will promote the development of methods to increase the efficiency of applied nutrients. Nitrogen (N) is often the most limiting nutrient for cereal grain production and represents one of the highest input costs in agr...

Major investments in infrastructure rehabilitation have been undertaken by govemments, development banks and donors in developing countries in recent decades. In Sub-Saharan Africa road deterioration is perceived to be one ofthe main causes for the limited supply response after price liberalization in agricultural markets. Studies of the quantitative effects on marketing margins are rare. This ...

Data-driven techniques help boost agricultural productivity by increasing yields, reducing losses and cutting down input costs. However, these techniques have seen sparse adoption owing to high costs of manual data collection and limited connectivity solutions. In this paper, we present FarmBeats, an end-to-end IoT platform for agriculture that enables seamless data collection from various sens...

In models of economic geography, plant-level scale economies and trade costs create incentives for spatial agglomeration of production into a manufacturing core and agricultural periphery, creating regional income differentials. We examine tax competition between national governments to influence the location of manufacturing activity. Labour is imperfectly mobile and governments impose redistr...

A partial-equilibrium, two-country model is developed to analyze implications from the introduction of genetically modified (GM) products. In the model, innovators hold proprietary rights, farmers are (competitive) adopters, some consumers deem GM food to be inferior in quality to traditional food, and the mere introduction of GM crops affects the costs of non-GM food (because of costly identit...

Advocates for pasture-based dairying argue that this dairy production system requires less capital and labor resources than conventional, confinement-based, dairy systems. These reduced resource needs are supposed to translate into higher profits because lower use of capital and labor means lower production costs. Data for Wisconsin dairies obtained in 2000 as a part of the Agricultural Resourc...