Economics has looked at the decision process of politicians but the decision process of agency staff has primarily been the purview of sociologists. Agencies affect the final form of regulations, they may enforce or ignore regulations that exist, and they provide information to the political process. Policies recommended by economists for nonpoint source pollution control are seldom supported b...

The government of Viet Nam places a high priority on upgrading the quality of farmers' lives. Providing adequate occupational safety and health (OSH) protection for all farmers is an important challenge. The Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs (MOLISA) of Viet Nam trained WIND (Work Improvement in Neighbourhood Development) farmer volunteers. From 2004-2007, MOLISA in cooperation wi...

With numerous challenges hindering smallholders’ adoption of externally developed technologies, it is often argued that farmer innovation can play an essential role in rural livelihoods. Yet a rigorous assessment of the impact of farmer innovation is lacking. We address this issue by analyzing the effect of farmer innovation on household welfare, measured by income, consumption expenditure, and...

A shrimp farmer in Taiwan practices innovation through trial-and-error for better income and a better environment, but such farmer-based innovation sometimes fails because the biological mechanism is unclear. Systematic field experimentation and laboratory research are often too costly, and simulating ground conditions is often too challenging. To solve this dilemma, we propose a decision suppo...

A critical step in the quantification of soil quality (SQ) is the selection of SQ benchmarks. The benchmarks used in this study were SQ ratings made by 32 farmer collaborators representing a range of farming systems, scales of operation and geographic locations in the Mid-Atlantic region of USA. Soils from 45 pairs of sites identified by their farmers as having good and poor SQ were sampled ove...

1 Formal Logic with Conceptual Graphs 3 Frithjof Dau 1.

G(u,u',u") = 0, (1) where u = u(x, x,..., x), and u', u" denote all the first and second partial derivatives of u. For simplicity we will assume here that both u and G are scalars and denote by ua, uab, the partial derivatives dau and respectively dahu; a,b =1,2, ..., n+1. Let u (x) be a given solution of (1). Our equation is said to be elliptic or hyperbolic at u°(x) according to whether the (...

BACKGROUND, AIM, AND SCOPE The controversy over the world's first genetically modified (GM) wheat, Roundup Ready wheat (RRW), challenged the efficacy of 'science-based' risk assessment, largely because it excluded the public, particularly farmers, from meaningful input. Risk analysis, in contrast, is broader in orientation as it incorporates scientific data as well as socioeconomic, ethical, an...

This study examines the impact of contract farming with Farmer Organizations on farmers’ income. Contract farming with farmer organizations is a smallholder farmer-inclusive contract farming system. Field surveys were conducted in August 2010 with 75 farmers (including 39 contract farmers) in Kampong Thom province, Cambodia. The analysis—i.e., using a treatment effects model—indicates that cont...