Two varieties of grapes, white grape and red grape grown in the Campania region of Italy were selected for the study of drying characteristics. Comparisons were made with treated and untreated grapes under constant drying condition of 50 C in a conventional drying system. This temperature was selected to represent farm drying conditions. Grapes were purchased from a local market from the same s...

The inherent safety, convenience, availability, nutritional content, aesthetic appeal, and variety that typify our food supplies are a hallmark of modern life, but this was not always the case. For the last 100 years we have been witnessing dramatic advances in the scientific understanding and engineering techniques that increase agricultural production and allow for the commercial-scale produc...

This article constructs measures of multifactor productivity (MFP) for physicians' offices using a variation of the productivity methodology developed by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for other industries. Two alternatives measures are presented and both yield positive gains in physicians' office MFP over the study period. These increases lie below MFP rates for the general economy ...

Eff orts to exclude disease organisms from farms growing irrigated lettuce and leafy vegetables on California’s central coast are confl icting with traditionally accepted strategies to protect surface water quality. To begin resolving this dilemma, over 100 offi cials, researchers, and industry representatives gathered in April 2007 to set research priorities that could lead to eff ective co-ma...

In this paper, we consider the M/G/k queueing system with setup times. This particular queueing model is common in manufacturing systems, where idle machines are turned off to save on operating costs, as well as in server farms, where idle servers are turned off to conserve power. While recent literature has analyzed the M/M/k system with exponential setup times, no closedform solutions were ob...

Climate variability can induce uncertainty in yields, and threaten long term economic viability of rainfed agricultural enterprises in the absence of effective adaptation strategies. Enterprise mix diversification has been found to be an effective adaptation strategy for mitigating multiple sources of farm business risk in some contexts. The extent to which enterprise mix diversification can mi...

It is probable that ‘The Farm Beneath the Sand’ will come to stand for a revolution in archaeological investigation. The authors show that a core of soil from an open field can provide a narrative of grazing animals, human occupation and their departure, just using DNA and AMS dating. In this case the conventional archaeological remains were nearby, and the sequence obtained by the old methods ...

The following paper advocates an active rural employment policy in order to reduce rural poverty in the development countries and initiate a sustainable development process. The permanent large increases in the population call for a significant number of employment and income opportunities. As the agricultural sector’s capacity to provide employment is limited, the only alternative is the rural...

Interstate highways are a permanent and increasingly important feature of America’s rural landscape. Their impact on agriculture and rural living, which is already felt, w ill be greatly intensified in the next few years. Consider some of the overall dimensions of this new highway system. Of the 41,000 miles authorized, more than 35,000 miles are classed as rural. ( 1 ) * One-third of all count...