This plenary talk at the eighth annual Midwest Rural Agricultural Safety and Health Forum, November 2009, described a conference held earlier in the year focusing on the hazards and risks associated with moving agricultural equipment on public roads. The Farm Equipment-Motor Vehicle Crash Prevention Conference (FEMVCPC), March 2009, Des Moines, Iowa, drew 54 participants representing 13 states ...

Accurate exposure assessment to airborne fungi in agricultural environments is essential for estimating the associated occupational health hazards of workers. The objective of this pilot study was to compare personal and stationary sampling for assessing farmers' exposure to airborne fungi in 3 different agricultural confinements located in Ohio, USA (hog farm, dairy farm, and grain farm), usin...

Vegetable production constitutes an important sub-sector of the agricultural economy of KwaZulu-Natal. Most vegetables are cultivated in mixed-cropping types of farming systems. The technical efficiency of vegetable based cropping systems was estimated in order to identify the potential increase in production without incurring additional costs. The factors affecting technical efficiency and con...

1. The Executive Secretary is circulating herewith, for the information of participants in the seventh meeting of the Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA), a background paper prepared by the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute (IPGRI) on on-farm management of crop genetic diversity. This information note supplements the progress report by the Ex...

Adaptation in agriculture to climate change is important for impact and vulnerability assessment and for the development of climate change policy. A wide variety of adaptation options has been proposed as having the potential to reduce vulnerability of agricultural systems to risks related to climate change, often in an ad hoc fashion. This paper develops a typology of adaptation to systematica...

The best way to organize the logistics of harvesting agricultural crops requires considering not only the fact that agricultural commodities in general are highly perishable, but also the fact that the organizational structure of the agricultural system in question can vary from crop to crop and from region to region within a single crop. This paper develops a model for planning the movement of...

This paper explores the importance of the risk of violence on the decision making of rural households, using a unique panel data set for Colombian coffee-growers. We identify two channels. First, we examine the direct impact of conflict on agricultural production through the change in the percentage of the farm allocated to coffee. Second, we explore how conflict generates incentives to substit...

//e xte ns ion .or eg on observations are unique to a specific site or situation, and information learned is not transferable to others. Scientists rely on research-based information derived from replicated experiments that are, for the most part, reductive in nature. Farmers, on the other hand, often question the relevance of small, controlled, and replicated plot research conducted on researc...