'Retired' Sensitive Cropland: Here Today, Gone Tomorrow?

Falling commodity prices have renewed farmers' interest in expanding the Conservation Reserve Program, or CRP, which protects environmentally sensitive land by paying farmers "rent" to take it out of crop production. CRP has long been the cornerstone of federal conservation policy, but its benefits are fleeting. Once the rental contracts expire, farmers go back to planting crops and the benefits are lost. Long-term or permanent conservation easements would do a much better job of mitigating the negative environmental impacts of American agriculture.That's the finding of a new EWG report that shows how conservation easement programs are better for the environment and are better investments for taxpayers than CRP. Traditional row-crop agriculture is increasingly causing environmental and public health problems. Threats to public health through contaminated drinking water, poor air quality and toxic algal blooms are widespread and costly, and fish and wildlife habitats and populations face ongoing risks.Although CRP provides conservation benefits that help alleviate these threats, the benefits are lost as soon as the contract expires and land is brought back into crop production. Between 2007 and 2014, 15.8 million acres dropped out of the CRP program and were not re-enrolled. These 10-year contracts cost taxpayers an estimated $7.3 billion to rent. At the same time, only 6.7 million "new" acres were enrolled in CRP, for a net loss of more than 9 million acres.Programs that focus on long-term or permanent easements already exist. The Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program works with states to target high-priority objectives, including conservation easements. The Wetland Reserve Easement option in the Agricultural Conservation Easement Program enrolls acres in easements to restore, protect and enhance wetlands.Instead of expanding CRP, more funding in the 2018 Farm Bill should go to both of these highly effective programs. That would be a better deal for taxpayers, the environment and public health.

Is Federal Crop Insurance Policy Leading to Another Dust Bowl?

As the southern Great Plains get hotter and drier, is federal policy that encourages farmers not to adapt to climate change leading to another Dust Bowl?That's the troubling question raised by a new EWG report that shows how a provision in the federal crop insurance program provides a strong financial incentive for growers to plant the same crops in the same way, year in and year out, regardless of changing climate conditions. What's worse, this program is focused on the same southern Great Plains counties hit hardest by the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, the worst man-made environmental disaster in American history.The federal crop insurance program guarantees farmers' earnings from their crops won't fall below a percentage of their usual income. The percentage is set based on a multi-year average of a farmer's actual crop yields. Averaging good and bad years grounds the program in reality.But a provision called the Actual Production History Yield Exclusion – snuck into the 2014 Farm Bill during conference negotiations – allows growers to drop bad years from their average crop yield calculations. The government simply pretends these bad years didn't happen. In some cases, more than 15 bad years can be thrown out when calculating the average yield, resulting in artificially inflated insurance payouts.It makes sense for crop insurance to give growers a break if they're occasionally hit by one or two bad years, but keeping growers on a treadmill of failed crops and insurance payouts is foolish. Helping farmers adapt to the new weather conditions would be considerably better, and was exactly what helped growers survive the Dust Bowl and return to productivity.The southern Great Plains are getting hotter and drier. Drought has been common over the last 10 years and forecasts show the number of days above 100 degrees quadrupling by 2050. Implementing conservation practices to adapt to changing climate conditions is vital for growers who want to stay in business.Some, but not enough, growers are already adopting conservation techniques in this region. Savings from ending the misguided yield exclusion policy could be used to help more growers change the way they farm to face the challenges posed by a changing climate

Smoking related disease risk, area deprivation and health behaviours

Acknowledgements We thank Professor Luke Vale, Dr Diane Stockton and participants at the Faculty of Public Health conference, Aviemore, Scotland, November 2011 and UK Society for Behavioural Medicine conference, Stirling, Scotland, December 2011 for helpful comments. Funding This work was supported by the Medical Research Council National Preventive Research Initiative Phase 2 [G0701874]; see http://www.npri.org.uk. The Funding Partners relevant to this award are: British Heart Foundation; Cancer Research UK; Department of Health; Diabetes UK; Economic and Social Research Council; Medical Research Council; Research and Development Office for the Northern Ireland Health and Social Services; Chief Scientist Office; Scottish Government Health Directorates; The Stroke Association; Welsh Assembly Government and World Cancer Research Fund. The Health Economics Research Unit is funded by the Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Government Health and Social Care DirectoratePeer reviewedPostprin

Bioaugmentation for Improved Recovery of Anaerobic Digesters After Toxicant Exposure

Bioaugmentation was investigated as a method to decrease the recovery period of anaerobic digesters exposed to a transient toxic event. Two sets of laboratory-scale digesters (SRT = 10 days, OLR = 2 g COD/L-day), started with inoculum from a digester stabilizing synthetic municipal wastewater solids (MW) and synthetic industrial wastewater (WW), respectively, were transiently exposed to the model toxicant, oxygen. Bioaugmented digesters received 1.2 g VSS/L-day of an H2-utilizing culture for which the archaeal community was analyzed. Soon after oxygen exposure, the bioaugmented digesters produced 25–60% more methane than non-bioaugmented controls (p \u3c 0.05). One set of digesters produced lingering high propionate concentrations, and bioaugmentation resulted in significantly shorter recovery periods. The second set of digesters did not display lingering propionate, and bioaugmented digesters recovered at the same time as non-bioaugmented controls. The difference in the effect of bioaugmentation on recovery may be due to differences between microbial communities of the digester inocula originally employed. In conclusion, bioaugmentation with an H2-utilizing culture is a potential tool to decrease the recovery period, decrease propionate concentration, and increase biogas production of some anaerobic digesters after a toxic event. Digesters already containing rapidly adaptable microbial communities may not benefit from bioaugmentation, whereas other digesters with poorly adaptable microbial communities may benefit greatly

Dispute Resolution and the Retirement Villagers Act 2003: A fair and independent process?

This thesis will explain what an appropriate process for dispute resolution in a retirement village should look like. It will also evaluate how close to that ideal the model contained in the Retirement Villages Act 2003 (RVA) is. It will conclude that the Act model fails because at both steps in its dispute resolution process, it places one of the parties, the operator, in the position of selecting, ensuring independence and paying for a mediator and a disputes panel. This thesis also finds the lack of legal status for residents' committees deprives residents of a source of support and representation. The linchpin role in the Act, the statutory supervisor, also has a disputes resolution function. This thesis finds the role of statutory supervisor also lacks independence because the selection and payment for the role is placed with the operator. Evidence suggests a large share of the market is 'captured' by one Trustee Company that does not maintain independence from operators and may not communicate with residents at a level appropriate to the age of the resident population; the average age of retirement village residents in New Zealand is 83 years. The thesis also finds that mediation is not a suitable process for people in their later years, especially older women when the contested matters surround contractual rights and include on-going fees. The key finding in the thesis is that the Act is not fair or independent for residents

Bones Of The Knee Joint And Individual Features That can Be Used For Forensic Identification

This dissertation describes the normal osteology of the bones of the knee joint in correlation to the surrounding soft tissues. Traumatic and surgical modifications of the normal osteological features are also discussed in reference to their significance for anthropological analysis as well as for forensic identification. As a primary focus, a new method of racial determination from the distal femur is described in detail. This new method involves the measurement of the intercondylar shelf in relation to the posterior shaft of the femur. The intercondylar shelf is a feature of the distal femur that shows significant difference between American Whites and Blacks. The intercondylar shelf is the roof of the intercondylar notch, and in lateral radiographs the posterior cortex of the femur and the intercondylar shelf can be seen as distinct lines of dense bone. The angle between the posterior shaft of the femur and intercondylar shelf can be easily defined and measured. For this study, lateral knee radiographs of 240 White and 183 Black subjects were measured. The White mean was 147 degrees (std. dev. 4.28) and the Black mean was 138 degrees (std. dev. 4.18). This difference is statistically significant (p \u3c .0001) and yields a correct classification of 87%. The same measuring technique was performed as a blind test on radiographs of known skeletal material with similar results. Variations in the intercondylar shelf angle are presumed to be independent of the size or shape of the femur. In addition, the measurement of this angle is not restricted or altered by arthritis in the notch or by trauma to the articular surfaces. Fragmentary femora can be measured. This is a non-invasive technique that can be used in forensic cases as well as archaeological cases where there are intact soft tissues

Long wave expansions for water waves over random topography

In this paper, we study the motion of the free surface of a body of fluid over a variable bottom, in a long wave asymptotic regime. We assume that the bottom of the fluid region can be described by a stationary random process $\beta(x, \omega)$ whose variations take place on short length scales and which are decorrelated on the length scale of the long waves. This is a question of homogenization theory in the scaling regime for the Boussinesq and KdV equations. The analysis is performed from the point of view of perturbation theory for Hamiltonian PDEs with a small parameter, in the context of which we perform a careful analysis of the distributional convergence of stationary mixing random processes. We show in particular that the problem does not fully homogenize, and that the random effects are as important as dispersive and nonlinear phenomena in the scaling regime that is studied. Our principal result is the derivation of effective equations for surface water waves in the long wave small amplitude regime, and a consistency analysis of these equations, which are not necessarily Hamiltonian PDEs. In this analysis we compute the effects of random modulation of solutions, and give an explicit expression for the scattered component of the solution due to waves interacting with the random bottom. We show that the resulting influence of the random topography is expressed in terms of a canonical process, which is equivalent to a white noise through Donsker's invariance principle, with one free parameter being the variance of the random process $\beta$. This work is a reappraisal of the paper by Rosales & Papanicolaou \cite{RP83} and its extension to general stationary mixing processes

Dysregulation of cadherins in the intercalated disc of the spontaneously hypertensive stroke-prone rat

The structural integrity of cardiac cells is maintained by the Ca2+-dependent homophilic cell-cell adhesion of cadherins. N-cadherin is responsible for this adhesion under normal physiological conditions. The role of cadherins in adverse cardiac pathology is less clear. We studied the hearts of the stroke-prone spontaneously hypertensive (SHRSP) rat as a genetic model of cardiac hypertrophy and compared them to Wistar-Kyoto control animals. Western blotting of protein homogenates from 12-week old SHRSP animals indicated that similar levels of [beta], [gamma]-, and [alpha]-catenin and T, N and R-cadherin were expressed in the control and SHRSP animals. However, dramatically higher levels of E-cadherin were detected in SHRSP animals compared to controls at 6, 12 and 18áweeks of age. This was confirmed by quantitative Taqman PCR and immunohistochemistry. E-cadherin was located at the intercalated disc of the myocytes in co-localisation with connexin 43. Adenoviral overexpression of E-cadherin in rat H9c2 cells and primary rabbit myocytes resulted in a significant reduction in myocyte cell diameter and breadth. E-cadherin overexpression resulted in re-localisation of [beta]-catenin to the cell surface particularly to cell-cell junctions. Subsequent immunohistochemistry of the hearts of WKY and SHRSP animals also revealed increased levels of [beta]-catenin in the intercalated disc in the SHRSP compared to WKY. Therefore, remodelling of the intercalated disc in the hearts of SHRSP animals may contribute to the altered function observed in these animal