In 2007, the National Children's Center for Rural and Agricultural Health and Safety (NCCRAHS) published Agritourism Health and Safety Guidelines for Children to provide helpful recommendations for protecting the health and safety of children visiting agritourism farms. Supplement A: Policies and Procedures Guide and Supplement B: Worksite Guide were subsequently published in 2009 and provided ...

Wind energy is a key renewable source, yet wind farms have relatively high cost compared with many traditional energy sources. Among the life cycle costs of wind farms, operation and maintenance (O&M) accounts for 25–30%, and an efficient strategy for management of turbines can significantly reduce the O&M cost. Wind turbines are subject to fatigue-induced degradation and need periodic inspecti...

As a part of the USEPA's concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) final rule, all CAFOs are required to develop and implement a nutrient management plan (NMP). The USEPA's emphasis on better management of nutrients appropriately targets a critical environmental issue associated with animal production. The concentration of animals in livestock feeding operations, often separate from feed gra...

This paper aims to estimate a translog stochastic frontier production function in the analysis of a balanced panel of 147 mixed Catalan farms in a five-year period (1989-1993), in order to attempt to measure and explain variation in output inefficiency scores with a one-stage approach. The mean output efficiency in the period analysed was estimated to be 62.3%. Using techniques for confidence i...

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...

As the share of wind energy in power system increases, consideration of these resources in power system planning, particularly in Transmission Expansion Planning (TEP) is becoming more and more important. In this paper, a Probabilistic Multi-Objective Transmission Expansion Planning (PMO-TEP) is presented to find the optimal node for connecting the large scale distant wind farm to the network f...

The technique of the processor farm has become very widely used for paral lelising applications often being mentioned without reference to any source The goal of this work has been to put together a complete and rigorous un derstanding of what the technique can be used for and what is needed in order to arrive at an e ciently farmed application This paper consists of these two parts We have sho...

The Scottish aquaculture industry has been expanding steadily for several decades, and has an objective to double production between 2015 and 2030. While the Scottish government supports this aim, concerns about farm impacts have meant that developments are generally opposed at a local scale, where the planning and consent process takes place. In particular, the spread of sea lice and other pat...

Swine production operations, particularly high-density large-volume units, must be planned as a total system beginning with site selection. With increasing emphasis on a cleaner environment, more attention must be given to methods of manure management. Planning a group of buildings and their surroundings to present a wholesome image is as important as planning for productive efficiency. Farm op...

To assist water resource managers with future land use planning efforts, the eco-hydrological model Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) was applied to three catchments in South Australia that experience extreme low flow conditions. Particular land uses and management issues of interest included forest covers, known to affect water yields, and farm dams, known to intercept and change the hydro...