Land use and management change is a feature of New Zealand farm systems, driven by a range of factors including volatile markets and exchange rates, variable weather and climate patterns, continuous policy evolution and the inherent innovation of New Zealand farmers. Yet the common indicators used to evaluate the impact of change appear to be limited to the link between productivity (of land/la...

Q fever is a disease of humans, caused by Coxiella burnetii, and a large range of animals can be infected. This paper presents a review of the epidemiology of Q fever in humans and farm animals between 1982 and 2010, using case studies from four European countries (Bulgaria, France, Germany and the Netherlands). The Netherlands had a large outbreak between 2007 and 2010, and the other countries...

Children growing up on a farm in Europe or North America have rather consistently been observed to less often suffer from asthma and allergic diseases. 1 The hypothesis of possible protective effects of early life contact with a farming environment has opened a way for new understanding of the asthma and allergy epidemic in the Western world in the past few decades. A recent publication showed ...

The characterization of pro-poor growth, including the sources through which the poor benefit from public interventions, remains a topic of debate in the current development literature. This paper examines the impact of a range of policies across villages in rural Bangladesh (spanning credit and infrastructure expansion, as well as agricultural output pricing) not only on different sources of i...

The ongoing industrialization of U.S. agriculture encompasses important changes in farm production practices, in the organization of farm input and output markets, and in the mix of activities carried out by farm operators. These shifts raise important issues for the role of government in the sector and for the design of research and data programs to support public-policy analysis. Basic framew...

This paper addresses the allocation of indirect or joint costs among farm enterprises, and elaborates two maximum entropy models, the basic CoreModel and the InequalityModel, which additionally includes inequality restrictions in order to incorporate knowledge from production technology. Representing the indirect costing approach, both models address the individual-farm level and use standard c...

Using a descriptive approach, a study of the dynamics of farm mechanization was performed in the agricultural regions of Delicias, Chihuahua and La Begoña, Guanajuato, México. The study was aimed at identifying patterns of farm equipment utilization through multivariate analyses of relevant data. A total of 135 farmers were interviewed, along with 21 extension agents and 22 farm machinery deale...

A Response Surface-Based Wind Farm Cost (RS-WFC) model is developed for the engineering planning of wind farms. The RS-WFC model is developed using Extended Radial Basis Functions (E-RBF) for onshore wind farms in the U.S. This model is then used to explore the influences of different design and economic parameters, including number of turbines, rotor diameter and labor cost, on the cost of a w...

 The instability and mobility of migrant farm workers create unique barriers to accessing health care services including: transportation, cultural, language, and legal barriers. These barriers may prevent the diagnosis and treatment of HIV and sexually transmitted infections (STIs), and encourage their transmission.  Data on the behaviours of migrant farm workers show: lower rates of condom u...

ammonia (nh3) and nitrite (no2) toxic chemicals which resulted from fish culture, especially in intensive fish culture systems. to evaluate the efficiency of green algae scenedesmus quadricauda in ammonia and nitrite removal from intensive fish farm effluent and also its application as suitable culture medium for s. quadricauda , effluent water samples were collected from rainbow trout farm. si...