Tomato is one of the main vegetable crops in Kuwait with a total greenhouse production of 39,218.3 tonnes and with a value of $ 9.58 million in 2004. Because of the country’s harsh climate, scarce water resources and poor-quality land resources, protected agriculture has a significant role in Kuwait’s agricultural development. Tomato is grown in 25% of total area under greenhouse crops and it p...

Sections of this material may be reproduced for personal and not-for profit use without the express written permission of but with acknowledgment to IFPRI. To reproduce the material contained herein for profit or commercial use requires express written permission. To obtain permission, contact the Communications Division at [email protected]. ABSTRACT The paper extends the household hed...

If farmers are risk averse, greater farm income variability should increase off-farm labor supply. This effect is confirmed for a sample of Kansas farmers. Off-farm employment of farmers and their spouses is also found to be significantly influenced by farm experience, off-farm work experience, farm size, leverage, efficiency, and farm-specific education. In addition, farm operators and spouses...

This paper proposes a model for strategic maintenance scheduling of offshore wind farms (SMSOWF) in a deregulated power system. The objective of the model is to plan the maintenance schedules in a way to maximize the profit of the offshore wind farm. In addition, some network constraints, such as transmission lines capacity, and wind farm constraints, such as labor working shift, wave height li...

Semi-subsistence farms that predominate in developing countries have more complex goals than the strict profit motives of corporate farms. Small farm management decisions are commonly based on a desire to increase production while avoiding risks and reducing labor demands and operating costs. Enterprise budgets are a valuable tool for understanding diverse farming systems and farmers' decisionm...

Climate change mitigation will require extensive decarbonization of the electricity sector. This thesis addresses both large-scale wind integration (Papers 1–3) and development of new energy technologies (Paper 4) in service of this goal. Compressed air energy storage (CAES) could be paired with a wind farm to provide firm, dispatchable baseload power, or serve as a peaking plant and capture up...

Global biomass demand is expected to roughly double between 2005 and 2050. Current studies suggest that agricultural intensification through optimally managed crops on today's cropland alone is insufficient to satisfy future demand. In practice though, improving crop growth management through better technology and knowledge almost inevitably goes along with (1) improving farm management with in...

Readers may make verbatim copies of this document for non-commercial purposes by any means, provided that this copyright notice appears on all such copies. Abstract This paper attempts to improve the ability of farm managers and lenders to forecast expected financial performance of farm businesses using a neuro-fuzzy inference system. Ex-ante farn financial performance is examined to identify t...

Lack of information about technology and prices often hampers the empirical assessment of the validity of the profit maximization hypothesis. We show that the non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) methodology comprises natural tools for dealing with such incomplete information. In particular, we focus on the economic meaning of the DEA model that builds on assumptions of monotone and c...

in pasture-based milk production systems, using available farm resources in order to reduce feeding costs, the composition and functional properties of dairy cows’ milk are of considerable importance to the dairy farmer, manufacturer and consumer. basically, there are three options for altering the composition and/or functional properties of milk: 1) cow nutrition and grazing management, 2) cow...