State Sentencing Guidelines: Profiles and Continuum

Describes twenty-one state sentencing commissions; highlights key attributes of each state's sentencing guidelines and the composition of each commission; and compares guideline systems along a continuum from "more voluntary" to "more mandatory.

The Use and Performance of IntensiveRotational Grazing Among Wisconsin Dairy Farms in the 1990s

Growing numbers of Wisconsin dairy farmers have reported success using management intensive rotational grazing (MIRG) techniques that rely on pastures as the primary source of forage for their milking herds. The Program on Agricultural Technology Studies (PATS) has been tracking the use and performance of MIRG systems in Wisconsin since the early 1990s through periodic, large-scale, random sample surveys and on-farm interviews with Wisconsin farmers. Utilizing recent results from the PATS 1997 and 1999 Wisconsin Dairy Farm Polls, this report provides an important update to previous PATS reports. In our surveys, the dairy farmers who report utilizing pastures for forage are a diverse group. Grazing practices ranged from moving livestock several times a day through an extensive network of improved pasture paddocks to grazing the same large field all summer long. For purposes of maintaining consistency, in analyzing our data we defined MIRG as a system in which dairy farmers rely on pastures for at least part of the forage ration of their milking cows and move these cows to fresh pastures at least once a week. Farms that utilized pastures to obtain forage for their milking cows, but did not rotate their cows to a fresh pasture at least once a week, were classified as non-intensive grazing operations. Farm operations that did not rely on pasture for any part of their forage ration were categorized as confinement systems. On our 1999 survey, 22 percent of farmers reported using MIRG systems, 22 percent used pastures non-intensively, and 56 percent used full confinement systems

Management Intensive Rotational Grazingin Wisconsin: the 1990s

Growing numbers of Wisconsin dairy farmers have reported success using management intensive rotational grazing (MIRG) techniques that rely on pastures as the primary source of forage for their milking herds. The Program on Agricultural Technology Studies (PATS) has been tracking the use and performance of MIRG systems in Wisconsin since the early 1990s through periodic large-scale, random sample surveys of Wisconsin dairy farmers. This fact sheet incorporates recent results from PATS 1999 Dairy Farmer Poll into an overall summary of PATS grazing research

Farming inWisconsin at the End of the Century: Results of the 1999 Wisconsin Farm Poll

Farming in Wisconsin has undergone considerable change in the last few decades. U.S. Census statistics suggest that the state lost almost 13 percent of its farms and over 10 percent of its farmland between 1987-1997. The decline in farm numbers was particularly severe for mid-sized commercial livestock farms. During this period, the number of hog farms dropped by almost 60 percent, dairy farms fell by 40 percent, and farms with any harvested cropland declined by more than 20 percent (Buttel, 1999). Meanwhile, when dairy and hog farm number declines are removed from the equation, census results show that there was actually significant growth in part-time and hobby farm numbers during the 1990s in Wisconsin. While the periodic Census of Agriculture provides some key insights into the long-term trends in the Wisconsin farm sector, the Census asks relatively few questions about a number of important topics. Specifically, there is little information gathered about the use of different agricultural technologies or management practices. In addition, despite the fact that most Wisconsin farms are run as family businesses, there is virtually no information collected about members of the farm household (other than the lead operator) or the household’s involvement in off-farm as well as farming activities. Finally, the Census asks no questions about the opinions or views of Wisconsin farmers concerning important public policy questions

Wisconsin Dairy Farmer Views onUniversity Research and Extension Programs

Over the last decade, the Program on Agricultural Technology Studies (PATS) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has received a wide range of formal and informal comments from Wisconsin farmers regarding the direction of university research and extension programs. In an era of declining Extension budgets, increasing privatization, and a rapidly changing farm structure, the debate about where to focus scarce public resources takes on an added significance. Is there still an important role for land grant institutions to play in agriculture in the new century? If so, how can limited resources be targeted most effectively? What do farmers and other citizens want from the land grant system? In order to systematically solicit farmer feedback on these issues, a series of questions about research and extension programs at the University of Wisconsin was included in the PATS 1999 Wisconsin Dairy Farm Poll, a statewide survey sent to 1,600 randomly selected dairy farmers. While the results summarized below focus primarily on the responses of dairy farmers, similar questions were asked of other types of farms in a separate survey sent out at the same time. In general, the response patterns of the nondairy farmers were similar to those of the dairy farm sample

Operational and Technical Updates to the Object Reentry Survival Analysis Tool

The Object Reentry Survival Analysis Tool (ORSAT) has been used in the NASA Orbital Debris Program Office for over 25 years to estimate risk due to uncontrolled reentry of spacecraft and rocket bodies. Development over the last 3 years has included: a major change to the treatment of carbon fiber- and glass fiber-reinforced plastics (CFRP and GFRP, respectively); an updated atmospheric model; a new model for computing casualty area around an impacting debris object; and a newly-implemented scheme to determine the breakup altitude of a reentry object. Software also was written to automatically perform parameter sweeps in ORSAT to allow for uncertainty quantification and sensitivity analysis for components with borderline demisability. These updates have improved the speed and fidelity of the reentry analysis performed using ORSAT, and have allowed for improved engineering understanding by estimating the uncertainty for each components survivability. A statistical model for initial conditions captures the latitude bias in population density, a large improvement over the previous inclination-based latitude-averaged models. A sample spacecraft has been analyzed with standard techniques using ORSAT 6.2.1 and again using all the updated models; we will demonstrate the variation in the total debris casualty area and overall expectation of casualty

Advantages of a Polycentric Approach to Climate Change Policy

Lack of progress in global climate negotiations has led scholars to reconsider polycentric approaches to climate policy. Several examples of subglobal mechanisms to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions have been touted, but it remains unclear why they might achieve better climate outcomes than global negotiations alone. Decades of work conducted by researchers associated with the Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University have emphasized two chief advantages of polycentric approaches over monocentric ones: they provide more opportunities for experimentation and learning to improve policies over time, and they increase communications and interactions — formal and informal, bilateral and multilateral — among parties to help build the mutual trust needed for increased cooperation. A wealth of theoretical, empirical and experimental evidence supports the polycentric approach