This paper explores the analytical relevance of Foucault’s notion of biopower in the context of regulating and managing non-human lives and populations, specifically those animals that are the focus of livestock breeding based on genetic techniques. The concept of biopower is seen as offering theoretical possibilities precisely because it is concerned with the regulation of life and of populati...

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...

In many real world problems, system parameters or model coefficients may be bounded between lower and upper bounds due to a variety of uncertainties. Over the past decades, intensive research efforts have focused on interval linear programming (ILP) to tackle such uncertainties. As one of the most popular methods for solving ILP problems, Two-Step Method (TSM, proposed by Huang et al. in 1995) ...

Many farm businesses are managed as one-man shows. Little financial information and almost none of the business decision-making functions are shared with others in the business or the family. There is seldom a plan for management succession or for developing backup management. Thus, when something happens to the only decision maker, many firms either fail or experience a traumatic adjustment pr...

BACKGROUND In 2007, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) initiated the Global plan of action for Farm Animal Genetic Resources (FAnGR). The main goal of this plan is to reduce further loss of genetic diversity in farm animals, so as to protect and promote the diversity of farm animal resources. An important step to reach this goal is to monitor and prioritize endang...

The field experiments were conducted on sandy loam soil at New Delhi, during 2007 and 2008 to investigate the effect of conservation tillage, irrigation regimes (sub-optimal, optimal and supra-optimal water regimes), and integrated nutrient management (INM) practices on soil biological parameters in wheat cultivation. The conservation tillage soils has shown significant (p<0.05) increase in soi...

The possibility of multiple locally optimal dose distributions in radiation treatment planning has been discussed and documented in the literature. Here we study a different question related to uniqueness: Is it possible for different treatment plans to generate the same dose distribution? For greatly simplified two-dimensional model problems, we show that the answer is ‘yes’ in regions where t...

from among the major problems of iran&apos;s present financial resources allocation system, one could refer to unclear relations between financial resources allocation policies and economic indicators as well as insufficient attention to the allocations according to projects priorities, absence of a controlled mechanism for allocation aimed for decreasing or eliminating deviations from the plan...