Managing the Economics of Soil Salinity

Saline soils result in decreased crop growth and yield with the potential for losing productive farm land. Enterprise budget analysis was extended to include the fixed costs of installing tile drainage to manage soil salinity in the Red River Valley of North Dakota for corn, soybeans, wheat, sugar beets, and barley. Installing tile drainage to manage soil salinity decreased per acre crop profitability from 19-49% due to the large upfront capital investment of tile drainage. These losses can be decreased to zero with more consistent and predictable yields from tile drainage in the intermediate to long run. With no salinity management lost revenues were estimated to be $150 million due to 1.2 million acres of slightly saline soils and 275,000 acres of moderate soil salinity.Crop Production/Industries, Land Economics/Use,

Understanding Citizen Complaints Regarding Michigan Agricultural Operations

citizen complaints, environmental compliance, livestock farms, manure management, Environmental Economics and Policy, Farm Management, Q24, Q53, Q58,

Confirmatory Factor Analysis of Farm Size and Performance

Replaced with revised version of poster 08/03/10.Farm size, farm performance, SEM models, Agricultural Finance, Farm Management,

Manure Handling System Attributes Impact on Manure Management Investment Decisions: A Random Utility Model Approach

Replaced with revised version of paper 07/22/08.Farm Management, Livestock Production/Industries,

Managing Dairy Heifer Growth Investment

Accelerated prepubertal growth rates can lower heifer raising costs but may put heifers at risk for impaired mammary development and have been found to be detrimental decreased to milk production in the first lactation. The tradeoff between heifer raising costs and milk production loss is examined in a capital budgeting model. Monthly annuity net present value of a heifer investment through the first lactation is assessed for heifers calving at 20, 22, 24, 26 and 28 months of age. A 24 mo AFC base case strategy with 9009.5 kg subsequent first lactation milk yields $7.34 in returns per month. Accelerated growth resulted in higher returns ($12.77/mo for 20 mo AFC; $9.86/mo for 22 mo AFC) when milk production is not affected as total raising costs decline relative to the base case. Slower growth resulted in lower returns ($5.12/mo for 26 mo AFC; $3.15/mo for 28 mo AFC). When milk production declines, revenues decline as do feed and marketing costs which are a function of milk produced. Adjusting for factors, breakeven milk production losses were 10.6 % for 20 mo AFC and 5.3 % for 22 mo AFC relative to the 24 mo AFC base. These results were not sensitive to the assumed discount rate, heifer feed costs or discount rate. Other operation-specific heifer management factors including calving season, reproduction, herd size/expansion considerations and, in the longer-term, heifer facilities investments may be more significant economically than the differences found in this analysis.Heifer growth, Economics, Investment, Livestock Production/Industries,

Dairy Farm Revenue Insurance: Is the Application Viable?

Risk and Uncertainty,

Does Tax Aggressiveness Lead to More Earnings Management: the Case of Tunisian Firms

The aim of this study is to determine whether a firm tax avoidance activity can be used as an instrument for corporate earnings management in an emerging market called Tunisia. The study also investigates the role of firm size, leverage and audit quality on earnings management. Evidence of earnings management is examined by focusing on accounting earnings management. From a sample of 20 Tunisian listed firms from 2017 to 2019, the results estimated from the linear regression model argue that tax aggressiveness has a positive effect on earnings management but not significant. Furthermore, the results show that larger Tunisian firms exhibit more earnings management. However, findings don’t show any significant effects of leverage and audit quality on earnings management

Optimal livestock diet formulation with farm environmental compliance consequences

The current method to derive livestock diets is to optimize cost performance subject to animal performance and resulting nutritional requirements via a linear programming model. In contrast, we examine the livestock diet formulation problem as a multi-criteria decision model with the criteria being cost performance, feed efficiency, and environmental compliance costs. We find that there are many situations where farm financial situations are improved by feeding products with higher costs per unit of protein but lower phosphorus levels.Environmental Economics and Policy,

Incorporating Environmentally Compliant Manure Nutrient Disposal Costs into Least-Cost Livestock Ration Formulation

Livestock rations are formulated to minimize feed cost subject to nutritional requirements for a target performance level, which ignores the potentially substantial cost of disposing of nutrients fed in excess of nutritional requirements. We incorporate nutrient disposal costs into a modified least-cost ration formulation model to arrive at a joint least-cost decision that minimizes the sum of feed and net nutrient disposal costs. The method is demonstrated with phosphorus disposal costs on a representative dairy farm. Herd size, land availability and proximity, crop rotation, and initial soil phosphorus content are shown to be important in determining phosphorus disposal costs.environmental compliance, linear programming, livestock rations, manure disposal, Agribusiness, Environmental Economics and Policy, Livestock Production/Industries, C61, Q12, Q52,

Learning Explicit and Implicit Arabic Discourse Relations.

We propose in this paper a supervised learning approach to identify discourse relations in Arabic texts. To our knowledge, this work represents the first attempt to focus on both explicit and implicit relations that link adjacent as well as non adjacent Elementary Discourse Units (EDUs) within the Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT). We use the Discourse Arabic Treebank corpus (D-ATB) which is composed of newspaper documents extracted from the syntactically annotated Arabic Treebank v3.2 part3 where each document is associated with complete discourse graph according to the cognitive principles of SDRT. Our list of discourse relations is composed of a three-level hierarchy of 24 relations grouped into 4 top-level classes. To automatically learn them, we use state of the art features whose efficiency has been empirically proved. We investigate how each feature contributes to the learning process. We report our experiments on identifying fine-grained discourse relations, mid-level classes and also top-level classes. We compare our approach with three baselines that are based on the most frequent relation, discourse connectives and the features used by Al-Saif and Markert (2011). Our results are very encouraging and outperform all the baselines with an F-score of 78.1% and an accuracy of 80.6%