Agricultural production in the Midwestern US is highly concentrated with 85% percent of cropland acreage planted to only corn and soybeans (NASS, 2006). Crop specialization has improved the productivity and market efficiency of grain based commodity crops, but maintaining profitability has become increasingly difficult as input prices continue to rise while grain prices fluctuate substantially ...

Sustainable and rational management of agrophytocenoses depends on various bioindices and methods of application, particularly the development and protection of soil resources (Lai et al., 2002). Among other indices, enzyme activity is proposed as a universal index of soil fertility and contamination (Dilly et al., 2003). To ascertain and to make a comparison of bioactivity variation during the...

In organic farming, as crops production is directly depending on soil quality, farmers pay attention to preserve soil ecosystem in order to benefit from better ecological services. Today, soil conservation practices, such as ploughless soil tillage and cover cropping, have gained prominence in organic cropping systems and provide for great potentials such as maintaining or increasing soil ferti...

Paul Corral (American University) Most endogenous sample selection issues have been dealt with variants of Heckman's selection model. The model relies on the assumption of normality. However, when dealing with data where the data generating process is unknown, and the data may be less than ideal an information theoretic approach may be more suitable. During the summer I have been working on imp...

Data Farming is a process that has been developed to support decision-makers by answering questions that are not currently addressed. Data farming uses an inter-disciplinary approach that includes modeling and simulation, high performance computing, and statistical analysis to examine questions of interest with a large number of alternatives. Data farming allows for the examination of uncertain...

This paper conducts an empirical study on output, costs and incomes in organic farming with a sample of Spanish firms. Financial accounting data reveals that organic and partly or transitional to organic farming do not get significantly different output than intensive farming. Farms in transition to organic farming bear significantly higher costs and obtain significantly lower income than inten...

One ecological environment monitoring system of Litopenaeus vannamei farming has been developed in order to protect and regulate the ecological environment of Litopenaeus vannamei farming, halt and reverses the situations in the ecological environment deterioration of Litopenaeus vannamei farming and the little farming success rate. The early warning information of ecological environment degrad...