Breeding goats for organic production in Germany

With only 120,000 females (year 2000), goat keeping is a niche activity in animal husbandry in Germany. Most of the goats (about 90%) are kept on part-time farms. The main reasons they are kept are as a hobby, for milk production and for landscape management; in many cases it is a non-profit oriented activity. There are estimates (no official statistics exist) that 20,000 goats are milked and 10,000 are used in landscape management to avoid shrub succession on protected biotopes. In the year 2000 10% of the goats (12,000) were kept on organic farms but not all for economic reasons. Because the dairy breeds in Germany (White and Brown German Alpine) are selected under intensive keeping conditions, breeding under the restrictions of organic farming is necessary to get adopted and high yielding flocks. This is even more true in the case of harsh environmental conditions in landscape management. The German breeds are not suitable for the needs while grazing on marginal biotopes. This paper will show some results of: · a ten-year breeding programme for more milk ingredients, fat and protein, in a flock of 30 mother goats on an organic farm and · the breeding programme of the “Witzenhäuser Landschaftspflegeziege WLZ” for the new purposes of landscape management

Organic Fodder Production in Intensive Organic Livestock Production in Europe: Recent Scientific Findings and the Impact on the Development of Organic Farming

Organic farming is practiced in over 100 countries on more than 26 million hectares. In the European Union (EU 25), about 5.6 million hectares of farm land are certified under the EU organic farming regulation 2092/91/EEC. Since 1992, these figures have been increased six times. The 160,000 organic farms in the EU 25 keep about 1.5 million cattle, 1.6 million sheep, 0.55 million pigs and 17.3 million chickens. Two different intensities can be identified: extensive and intensive organic animal husbandry. Extensive animal husbandry is mostly found on low productive and remote areas and carried out with beef cattle, sheep and goats. These systems cope easily with the organic farming standards. Intensive organic animal husbandry is found in more productive areas and done with dairy animals, pigs and chickens. High performance of production demands high quality feedstuff. For these farms, balanced diets are the major difficulty under the organic farming standards. The EU Commission decided that organic husbandry systems must have 100% organic diets by 2011, at that time conventional feedstuffs will be abandoned. This is a challenge for the development of intensive organic animal husbandry systems. In the last years, a lot of research has been carried out to solve the problems of optimised feeding rations for intensive organic animal husbandry. Nevertheless, most of them are preliminary and not all problems have been solved. This paper will present some recent scientific findings in fodder production for intensive organic animal husbandry in Europe: high protein quality, roughage quality, feedstuff processing and “healthy feed. ” The future demands for research and extension (R&D, M&E) will be derived in the conclusions

Report and preliminary results of RV METEOR Cruise M78/3. Sediment transport off Uruguay and Argentina: from the shelf to the deep sea ; 19.05.2009 – 06.07.2009, Montevideo (Uruguay) – Montevideo (Uruguay)

The waters off Uruguay and Northern Argentina offer the possibility to study sediment transport processes from ‘source-to-sink’ in a relatively small area. Quickly accumulated sediments are potentially unstable and might be transported downslope in canyons and/or on the open slope. Strong contour currents result in along-slope sediment transport. Within the scope of Meteor-Cruise M78/3 we investigated sediment transport and depositional patterns by means of hydroacoustic and seismic mapping as well as geological sampling with conventional coring tools and the new MARUM seafloor drill rig (MeBo). Geotechnical investigations were carried out with the aim to analyze the controlling parameters for the destabilization of the slope and the succeeding failure of a sediment body. Various types of sediment instabilities have been imaged in geophysical and core data, documenting particularly the continental slope offshore Uruguay to be locus of frequent submarine landslides. Apart from individual landslides, however, gravitational downslope sediment transport along the continental slope is restricted to the prominent Mar del Plata Canyon and smaller canyons identified in the bathymetric data. In contrast, many morphological features reveal that sediment transport is predominantly controlled by strong contour bottom currents. This suggests a significant impact of the western boundary currents on the overall architectural evolution of the margin. The investigations are related to projects of the DFG Research Center / Excellence Cluster 'The Ocean in the Earth System', University of Bremen, as well as the Excellence Cluster 'The Future Ocean', University of Kiel

Copenhagen Quantum Mechanics Emerges from a Deterministic Schroedinger Theory in 11 Dimensional Spacetime Including Weak Field Gravitation

We construct a world model consisting of a matter field living in 4 dimensional spacetime and a gravitational field living in 11 dimensional spacetime. The seven hidden dimensions are compactified within a radius estimated by reproducing the particle - wave characteristic of diffraction experiments. In the presence of matter fields the gravitational field develops localized modes with elementary excitations called gravonons which are induced by the sources (massive particles). The final world model treated here contains only gravonons and a scalar matter field. The solution of the Schroedinger equation for the world model yields matter fields which are localized in the 4 dimensional subspace. The localization has the following properties: (i) There is a chooser mechanism for the selection of the localization site. (ii) The chooser selects one site on the basis of minor energy differences and differences in the gravonon structure between the sites, which appear statistical. (iii) The changes from one localization site to a neighbouring one take place in a telegraph-signal like manner. (iv) The times at which telegraph like jumps occur dependent on subtleties of the gravonon structure which appear statistical. (v) The fact that the dynamical law acts in the configuration space of fields living in 11 dimensional spacetime lets the events observed in 4 dimensional spacetime appear non-local. In this way the phenomenology of Copenhagen quantum mechanics is obtained without the need of introducing the process of collapse and a probabilistic interpretation of the wave function. Operators defining observables need not be introduced. All experimental findings are explained in a deterministic way as a consequence of the time development of the wave function in configuration space according to Schroedinger's equation

New insights into organic farming in Germany – empirical results of a survey in 218 farms

A comprehensive description of the recent structure, performance and developments of organic farming in Germany does not exist. Because of this gap the Institute of Organic Farming and the Institute of Farm Economics of the German Federal Agricultural Research Centre (FAL) have carried out an interdisciplinary empirical analysis of the state of the art of Organic Farming in Germany in 2002-2003. In addition to the status-quo-analysis an important function of the study was to establish a long lasting research-organic farming network. Farm economists, organic crop production specialists, organic livestock specialists and sociologists are member of the scientific network. 218 randomly chosen farms throughout Germany have been surveyed in 2002/2003. The survey was carried out with face-to-face interviews including closed, open-ended and open response-option questions. Up to 15,000 variables per farm have been gathered. In this paper the major findings of the survey are described