In the Alps, summer farms are temporary units where the livestock herds are moved during summer to graze on highland pastures. Th is study aimed to analyze the role of summer farms in the dairy farming systems of the Trento province, in the eastern Italian Alps. Data on the structures and management of the 395 active summer farms were collected from the veterinarian services of the province: 34...

1 Summary and Implications Despite a significant body of research, interventions for PRRSV infection remain elusive. Traditional approaches to managing the risk of diseases have not been successful in many cases of PRRSV infection. While elimination of the virus from farms is possible, it is not without cost and re-infection is common. This survey sought to quantify the expected duration of PRR...

This report explores the differences in farm and farmer attributes, marketing and management practices, and economic performance among agritourism farms in Missouri receiving different numbers of visitors 1. This is the second report derived from the Missouri Agritourism Survey, a study conducted in 2009 by the Missouri Department of Agriculture and the University of Missouri Department of Park...

Approximately 100,000 youths are currently incarcerated in the US, yet little is known whether such a penalty deters future crime or interrupts human capital formation in a way that increases the likelihood of later criminal behavior. This paper uses the incarceration tendency of randomly-assigned judges as an instrumental variable to estimate causal effects of juvenile incarceration on adult r...

BACKGROUND During 8 months from July 2012 to February 2013, a major outbreak of canine distemper involving 64 mink farms occurred on the Danish peninsula of Jutland. The canine distemper outbreak was associated with exposure of farmed mink to infected wild carnivores and could represent a deficit in biosecurity on the mink farms. The aim of this study was to investigate the extent and associati...

In this paper, dynamic aspects of railway infrastructure operation and maintenance costs in Sweden are explored. Econometric cost functions are estimated to check the robustness of previous marginal cost estimates by introducing lags and leads of both dependent and independent variables. We find support for a forward-looking behaviour within the Swedish National Rail Administration (Banverket) ...

Suppose we have data from a bivariate model with parametric marginals. Efficient estimators of the parameters in the marginal models are generally not efficient in the bivariate model. In this article, we propose a method of improving these marginal estimators and demonstrate that the magnitude of this improvement can be as large as 100 percent in some cases.

During large Q fever outbreaks in the Netherlands between 2007 and 2010, dairy goat farms were implicated as the primary source of human Q fever. The transmission of Coxiella burnetii to humans is thought to occur primarily via aerosols, although available data on C. burnetii in aerosols and other environmental matrices are limited. During the outbreak of 2009, 19 dairy goat farms and one dairy...

1. SMART FARMS SET PERFORMANCE GOALS There is an old saying that you can’t get to your destination unless you know where you are going. Many farms that start on the path to milking excellence don’t make it because they don’t have clear quality goals for their farms. Many dairy farms consistently produce high quality milk. In 1998, over 1,800 Wisconsin dairy farms had average bulk tank somatic c...

The constraints that cooperative and non-cooperative dairy farms face in expanding milk production have been reported based on a field study on some cooperative and non-cooperative dairy farms in the state of West Bengal. The study has shown that non-cooperative farms face major constraints and high severity compared with cooperative farms in expanding milk production. Also important is that mo...