OBJECTIVE Circumstantial evidence suggests that organic farmers may have higher sperm count than other men, but comprehensive epidemiological studies of male fecundity among farmers have never been carried out. A substantial increase of sperm count is expected to translate into a shorter time to pregnancy--the number of menstrual cycles or months it takes a couple to get pregnant from discontin...

This descriptive and analytic study used a secondary data set to describe and compare medication use and agricultural injury experiences between younger (≤54 years old) and older (≥55 years old) farmers; and to examine the relationship between the use of specific classes of medication and reported agricultural injury. The study sample included a total of 316 farmers, age 26 to 80 years old; 103...

The importance of networks for social-ecological processes has been recognized in the literature; however, existing studies have not sufficiently addressed the dynamic nature of networks. Using data on the social learning networks of 265 farmers in Ethiopia for 2011 and 2012 and stochastic actor-oriented modeling, we explain the mechanisms of network evolution and soil conservation. The farmers...

Nowadays, farmers mainly adopt watermelon grafting technology to avoid wilt with the survival rate of grafted seedlings affected by temperature, humidity and light of the environment. Assurance of optimal environmental conditions has a direct influence on watermelon seedlings growth performance. At present, farmers usually observe the environmental temperature only through a thermometer, and ma...

This study was conducted to assess the comparative efficiency of Aftab Bahumukhi Farm Limited (ABFL) supervised broiler farms and farmers’ own managed broiler farms. Data were collected from randomly selected 90 broiler farmers of which 45 were ABFL supervised farmers and 45 were own managed farmers. Cobb-Douglas stochastic production function and cost frontier function were applied to determin...

The use of Precision Agriculture systems is in its infancy in Greece, because of the high fragmented land and the adherence of farmers to traditional farming methods. This paper presents the design, implementation and performance evaluation of an integrated agricultural monitoring and irrigation system using energy-autonomous wireless sensors and actuators. Monitoring and irrigation of the fiel...

Fresh produce supply chains have special characteristics, notably, that the quality of the product (fruit or vegetable) deteriorates continuously over time, even under ideal conditions. In this paper, we begin with explicit formulae for fresh produce quality deterioration based on chemistry and temperature and provide a path-based framework. We then focus on farmers’ markets, the popularity of ...

BACKGROUND The association between farmers' market characteristics and consumer shopping habits remains unclear. Our objective was to examine associations among distance to farmers' markets, amenities within farmers' markets, frequency of farmers' market shopping, fruit and vegetable consumption, and body mass index (BMI). We hypothesized that the relationship between frequency of farmers' mark...

OBJECTIVES The purpose of this study was to establish a basis for improving or strengthening the preventive strategy against scrub typhus in Korea by comparing and analyzing the difference of prevention behaviors contributing to the occurrence of scrub typhus in Japan and Korea. METHODS The survey was carried out in Jeollabuk-do, which is a high risk and high incidence area, and Fukuoka Prefe...

This manuscript presents the idea of providing dairy farmers with probability distributions to support decisions on mastitis management and illustrates its feasibility by two applications. Naive Bayesian networks were developed for both applications. The networks in the first application were used to compute probability distributions to support decisions on which cows from a mastitis alert list...