Iowa Farmers’ Decisions to Enroll in the Average Crop Revenue Election (Acre) Program

� In 2009 Iowa farmers who had at least some land enrolled in the existing DCP program offered by FSA were given the opportunity to switch to an alternative called ACRE.� Despite having access to information about the program and utilizing electronic decision aids, only 27.5% of the operators surveyed enrolled at least one farm in ACRE.�� Those who did enroll cited a desire for more risk protection and a belief that payments from ACRE would exceed the value of the direct payments they had to give up.� The primary reasons operators gave for not enrolling were the program was too complex, and they did not want to give up a portion of the direct payments.� Farmers who enrolled generally farmed more acres and depended more on crop production for their gross income, and were more likely to use other risk management tools such as crop insurance and pre-harvest pricing. �In general, farmers who enrolled in ACRE were more concerned about controlling financial risk in their farming operations than those who did not.risk; agricultural policy; USDA; agricultural management

One Health in food safety and security education: Subject matter outline for a curricular framework.

Educating students in the range of subjects encompassing food safety and security as approached from a One Health perspective requires consideration of a variety of different disciplines and the interrelationships among disciplines. The Western Institute for Food Safety and Security developed a subject matter outline to accompany a previously published One Health in food safety and security curricular framework. The subject matter covered in this outline encompasses a variety of topics and disciplines related to food safety and security including effects of food production on the environment. This subject matter outline should help guide curriculum development and education in One Health in food safety and security and provides useful information for educators, researchers, students, and public policy-makers facing the inherent challenges of maintaining and/or developing safe and secure food supplies without destroying Earth's natural resources

Lab and life: Does risky choice behaviour observed in experiments reflect that in the real world?

Risk preferences play a crucial role in a great variety of economic decisions. Measuring risk preferences reliably is therefore an important challenge. In this paper we ask the question whether risk preferences observed in economic experiments reflect real-life risky choice behaviour. We investigate in a sample representative for a rural region of eastern Uganda whether pursuing farming strategies with both a higher expected profit and greater variance of profits is associated with willingness to take risks in an experiment. Controlling for other determinants of risk-taking in agriculture, we find that risky choice behaviour in the experiment is correlated with risky choice behaviour in real life in one domain, i.e. the purchase of fertiliser, but not in other domains, i.e. the growing of cash crops and market-orientation more broadly. Our findings suggest that economic experiments may be good at capturing real-world risky choice behaviour that is narrowly bracketed

POLICY HARMONIZATION, CONVERGENCE, AND COMPATIBILITY ISSUES IN NORTH AMERICAN HORTICULTURE

Agricultural and Food Policy,

Labor Conditions in the Nicaraguan Sugar Industry

ILRF_nicaragua_sugar.pdf: 465 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

Seed coating for delayed germination

The diffuse leaching of plant nutrients from agricultural soils is part of the problem of the eutrophication of fresh water systems and coastal sea waters. Among the measures taken to reduce the leaching is keeping the soil with plant cover during autumn and winter. In areas with a predominance of annual crops this can be achieved by the undersowing of catch crops. In the current work it was investigated how the time of undersowing affected the barley (Hordeum distichon L.) crop and the catch crop biomass production. As catch crops Italian ryegrass (Lolium multiflorum L.), perennial ryegrass (Lolium perenne Lam.) and red clover (Trifolium pratense L.) were used. The biomass of the catch crop was markedly reduced with delayed undersowing, but net biomass production in late autumn was generally not affected. On light soil the barley yield was only to a small extent affected by the undersown catch crop, and with delayed undersowing the yield was even less affected. On heavier soil the barley yield was only marginally affected regardless of time of catch crop undersowing. An alternative to the undersowing of catch crops would be relay cropping of two cereal crops, one spring crop and one winter crop. As their initial competitive capacities are similar there is a risk that the winter crop will affect the spring crop yield adversely. To be able to set the competitive relationship between the crops favourably for the relay cropping system to be effective, a means to delay the winter crop germination is needed. Delayed undersowing has the risk of damaging the spring crop by the drilling procedur itself, and this was also noticed in the catch crop field experiments. In a couple of experiments the technique of coating seeds with polymers to achieve delayed germination was explored. The materials used were cellulose lacquer (in one experiment with the addition of lanolin) or an acrylic plastic, a so called primer. Wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) and oil seed rape (Brassica napus L.) were coated in house with several coating levels and germinated under controlled conditions in Petri dishes. In one experiment the coated seeds were germinated under three different temperature levels and three different moisture levels. It was found that delays could be achieved and that with increasing coating level the delays increased. It was also found that at low germination temperature (5.5 °C) for plastic coated seeds there was almost no difference in temperature sum needed from sowing to germination regardless of coating level. At high germination temperature (13.9 °C) there was a marked increase in temperature sum needed to germination and it increased with increasing coating level in comparison with uncoated seed. The resulting germination pattern was hypothetically explained by the dependence of water and oxygen uptake on temperature, in relation to the permeability of the coating materials. The permeability of the materials was probably rather constant over the temperature range. To gain the necessary control of the desired germination delay further investigations are needed, in collaboration with other scientific disciplines