CONTROL OF A MOBILE PEST: THE IMPORTED FIRE ANT

Crop Production/Industries,

BT COTTON REFUGE POLICY

Since cotton producers do not own legal rights to kill insect populations that are susceptible to insecticides, individual producers may have no incentive to account for future, insecticide-resistance productivity losses arising from their pest-management decisions. As a result, the collective actions of producers may increase the rate of resistance development relative to the rate that maximizes social welfare. Concerns regarding insect-pest development of resistance to Bt cotton prompted the Environmental Protection Agency to establish legal limits on the proportion of total acres individual producers may plant, representing the first attempt to regulate the development of insecticide resistance and the first instance of the use of refuge as a policy instrument. Ever since Carlson and Castle first pointed out the resource characteristics of insecticide susceptibility, pest management in the presence of increasing resistance has been viewed as an exhaustible resource allocation problem, and many studies have examined efficient insecticide use in this setting. Resistance management studies found in the economics literature, however, have examined single-insect single-insecticide problems almost exclusively. The majority of genetic and entomological studies have followed suit. Since cotton producers routinely use multiple insecticides and insecticide mixtures to manage multiple insect pests, and since simulation and empirical evidence suggests that toxin mixtures can affect the rate of resistance development to component toxins, the standard model may not be well suited for the examination of refuge policies under cotton production settings. Static refuge policies that maximize the present value of profit flows attainable by producers over five- and 10-year planning horizons are examined using a deterministic, operational model that accounts for short- and long-run features of production and resistance development. The model accounts for the development of resistance in two cotton insect pests to Bt cotton and a popular conventional insecticide, and relationships between refuge policy, insecticide resistance, producer profit and producer behavior in Louisiana. The model is used to examine relationships between resistance simulation model parameters and refuge policies and comparative advantages between treated and untreated refuge policies.Agricultural and Food Policy,

THE ESTIMATION OF COTTON COSTS IN THE SOUTHEAST

Crop Production/Industries,

INFORMATION QUALITY, TECHNOLOGY DEPRECIATION, AND BT COTTON ADOPTION IN THE SOUTHEAST

In 1996, Bt cotton became one of the first genetically engineered crops to be available commercially. This study focuses on the various sources and quality of information about Bt cotton profitability available to farmers in the Southeast and assesses the relative importance of such information in the farmers' adoption decisions. A model of the individual decision to adopt is developed to incorporate two recent theories of the role of information quality (the "effective information" hypothesis and the "popularity" hypothesis) as well as the effect of current technology depreciation. The data show some support for all three factors as determinants of adoption.Crop Production/Industries,

Marketing Orientation: A Longitudinal Study of Community Banks

Marketing orientation has long been touted as a means of improved business performance and a key to success in marketing management (Kotler, Keller & Chernev, 2021). This is a longitudinal study of community banks examining marketing orientation and business performance using a survey instrument based on the work of Narver and Slater (1990) and Kohli and Jaworski (1990). Four survey datasets cover the period preceding the Great Recession (2003-2005), the Great Recession and its fallout (2008-2010), a Post–Great Recession period (2014-2016), and the COVID-19 period (2020). Survey responses were gathered from a selected set of community bank CEOs in the Southeastern U.S. In addition to survey items about the organization\u27s marketing orientation, bank financial information was collected regarding assets and profits for each year in the study periods. Kohli and Jaworski (1990) make the point that business performance is responsive to changing external conditions. This study includes unemployment, GDP growth, inflation, labor participation rate, and the 10-year U.S. Treasury yield for its direct impact on bank performance. Research questions focus on variations in the bank\u27s approach to market orientation across the selected four economic periods. Do banks change their marketing orientation when economic conditions change? Do banks emphasize different variables in marketing orientation (customer, competitors, market planning) based on economic conditions? Does the relationship between marketing orientation and the bank\u27s financial performance change between the four economic periods

The Electromagnetic Self-Energy Contribution to M_p - M_n and the Isovector Nucleon Magnetic Polarizability

We update the determination of the isovector nucleon electromagnetic self-energy, valid to leading order in QED. A technical oversight in the literature concerning the elastic contribution to Cottingham's formula is corrected and modern knowledge of the structure functions is used to precisely determine the inelastic contribution. We find \delta M_{p-n}^\gamma = 1.30(03)(47) MeV. The largest uncertainty arises from a subtraction term required in the dispersive analysis, which can be related to the isovector magnetic polarizability. With plausible model assumptions, we can combine our calculation with additional input from lattice QCD to constrain this polarizability as: \beta_{p-n} = -0.87(85) x 10^{-4} fm^3.Comment: 5 pages, version accepted for publication in PR

Heritability of Seed Size in Different Successions of Arabidopsis Thaliana

Seed size is an important aspect in agricultural development, yet the genotypic effects are poorly understood. Populations of seed from recombinant inbred lines from the species Arabidopsis thaliana were measured in order to perform an ANOVA and calculate broad sense heritability of seed size. One hundred seeds per plant were scanned and measured using the software Image J. The obtained calculations gave 50.59 percent of broad sense heritability. This data is currently being used to map the genes responsible for the phenotypic output