Economic Comparison of Alternatives to Sulfamethazine Use in Pork Production

Sulfamethazinehas been widely used in the production of meat animals. It is effective as a product for treatment as well as prevention of animal disease leading to improved production efficiencies and lower cost meat and meat products. This was true especially in pork production. However, in recent years, use ofsulfamethazine in meat animal production has received a renewed focus. Thisstudy provides an economic analysis ofselected alternatives to the use of sulfamethazine in pork production. Alternatives evaluated were sulfathiazole, oxytetracycline, chlortetracycline, tylosin and lincomycin. Sulfathiazole isshown to be the most cost effective alternative. Production efficiency, production costs, and pork priceswere only slightly impacted when sulfathiazole was substituted for sulfamethazine. Sulfathiazole is followed by lincomycin, then the tetracyclines, and tylosi

Looking for a Job, Finding the Right Employee

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A Look at the Employment in the United States Swine Production Industry

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Employee Rosters Rise; Wages Continue to Climb

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Work Environment, Job Satisfaction, Top Employees Work Interests

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Economic Analysis of Increased Levels of Intramuscular Fat in Pork: Producer and Industry Opportunities

Ultrasound technology is available for accurately measuring intramuscular fat (IMF) in live pigs. This report provides information on the costs for pig producers and processors to implement this technology and what consumers are willing to pay for pork with improved levels of intramuscular fat. About half the participants in the willingness to pay study preferred the high IMF chop. They paid a premium of 25 percent over the low IMF chop.ultrasound technology, measure intramuscular fat live pigs, pig producer cost, pig processor costs, consumer willingness to pay, Agribusiness, Agricultural and Food Policy, Consumer/Household Economics, Demand and Price Analysis, Farm Management, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Livestock Production/Industries, Marketing,

The Effects of Bovine Growth Hormone (bGH) on Dairy Farm Profitability by Type of Government Program

Administration of Bovine Growth Hormone (bGH) to dairy cows has been shown to increase milk production. Injecting milk cows with bGH results in increased milk production per cow from 10 to 40 percent (Kalter et al.). This response is rapid and continues as long as treatment is given. Presently, the injection is daily, but research is ongoing to develop implants to eliminate this tedious and laborious approach. Some feel that bGH will be available for commercial use within two or three years. It is now in the testing stage for Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval

Genetic Classification of Populations using Supervised Learning

There are many instances in genetics in which we wish to determine whether two candidate populations are distinguishable on the basis of their genetic structure. Examples include populations which are geographically separated, case--control studies and quality control (when participants in a study have been genotyped at different laboratories). This latter application is of particular importance in the era of large scale genome wide association studies, when collections of individuals genotyped at different locations are being merged to provide increased power. The traditional method for detecting structure within a population is some form of exploratory technique such as principal components analysis. Such methods, which do not utilise our prior knowledge of the membership of the candidate populations. are termed \emph{unsupervised}. Supervised methods, on the other hand are able to utilise this prior knowledge when it is available. In this paper we demonstrate that in such cases modern supervised approaches are a more appropriate tool for detecting genetic differences between populations. We apply two such methods, (neural networks and support vector machines) to the classification of three populations (two from Scotland and one from Bulgaria). The sensitivity exhibited by both these methods is considerably higher than that attained by principal components analysis and in fact comfortably exceeds a recently conjectured theoretical limit on the sensitivity of unsupervised methods. In particular, our methods can distinguish between the two Scottish populations, where principal components analysis cannot. We suggest, on the basis of our results that a supervised learning approach should be the method of choice when classifying individuals into pre-defined populations, particularly in quality control for large scale genome wide association studies.Comment: Accepted PLOS On

Arabidopsis defense against Botrytis cinerea : chronology and regulation deciphered by high-resolution temporal transcriptomic analysis

Transcriptional reprogramming forms a major part of a plant’s response to pathogen infection. Many individual components and pathways operating during plant defense have been identified, but our knowledge of how these different components interact is still rudimentary. We generated a high-resolution time series of gene expression profiles from a single Arabidopsis thaliana leaf during infection by the necrotrophic fungal pathogen Botrytis cinerea. Approximately one-third of the Arabidopsis genome is differentially expressed during the first 48 h after infection, with the majority of changes in gene expression occurring before significant lesion development. We used computational tools to obtain a detailed chronology of the defense response against B. cinerea, highlighting the times at which signaling and metabolic processes change, and identify transcription factor families operating at different times after infection. Motif enrichment and network inference predicted regulatory interactions, and testing of one such prediction identified a role for TGA3 in defense against necrotrophic pathogens. These data provide an unprecedented level of detail about transcriptional changes during a defense response and are suited to systems biology analyses to generate predictive models of the gene regulatory networks mediating the Arabidopsis response to B. cinerea