Structure and Finances of U.S. Farms: 2005 Family Farm Report

Most farms in the United States- 98 percent in 2003- are family farms. They are organized as proprietorships, partnerships, or family corporations. Even the largest farms tend to be family farms, although they are more likely to have more than one operator. Very large family farms and nonfamily farms account for a small share of farms but a large-and growing-share of farm sales. Small family farms account for most of the farms in the United States but produce a modest share of farm output. Median income for farm households is 10 percent greater than the median for all U.S. households, and small-farm households receive substantial off-farm income. Many farm households have a large net worth, reflecting the land-intensive nature of farming.Agricultural Finance, Consumer/Household Economics, Industrial Organization,

ERS Farm Typology for a Diverse Agricultural Sector

The Economic Research Service (ERS) developed a farm typology which categorizes farms into more homogeneous groups than do classifications based on sales volume alone, producing a more effective policy development tool. The typology is used to describe U.S. farms.Farm Management,

Municipal Composting and Organic Waste Diversion: The Case of Fayetteville, Arkansas

It is estimated that 40% of food is wasted in the United States; representing $165 billion in wasted resources. A vast majority of that wasted food is ultimately placed in landfills where it decomposes and releases harmful greenhouse gases (GHGs). In fact, food waste alone is responsible for 23% of annual methane emissions for the US. This has a huge impact on global climate change due to the potency of methane as a greenhouse gas. Currently only 5% of the food waste produced is recovered across the nation. Source reduction would be the best solution to reducing this food waste, however, large-scale source reduction is not feasible with the current food market in the US. This is why many cities are beginning to adopt municipal composting programs as a way to divert more of their waste from landfills. The goal of this research was to review and show the impacts of how Fayetteville, Arkansas currently handles waste throughout the city, particularly in regards to food waste and other compostable organics. After getting a snapshot of Fayetteville’s current situation, a model created by the EPA was used to assess the carbon footprint of Fayetteville’s current waste management system. A proposed system in which all organic waste is diverted is created and analyzed within the model, in order to compare the impact the city could have on reducing their carbon footprint. The proposed system reduced the carbon footprint of the cities waste management system by over 200%. Based on the proposed system total impact from waste management would go from a net positive impact of 4,796 MTCO2E per year to a net negative impact of 4,989 MTCO2E per year. These results help to prove that moving toward composting all organics would result in decreasing the impact the third largest city in Arkansas has on the environment

A dynamical symmetry for supermembranes

A dynamical symmetry for supersymmetric extended objects is given.Comment: 3 page

Million-Dollar Farms in the New Century

Million-dollar farms—those with annual sales of at least $1 million—accounted for about half of U.S. farm sales in 2002, up from a fourth in 1982 (with sales measured in constant 2002 dollars). By 2006, million-dollar farms, accounting for 2 percent of all U.S. farms, dominated U.S. production of high-value crops, milk, hogs, poultry, and beef. The shift to million-dollar farms is likely to continue because they tend to be more profitable than smaller farms, giving them a competitive advantage. Most million-dollar farms (84 percent) are family farms, that is, the farm operator and relatives of the operator own the business. The million-dollar farms organized as nonfamily corporations tend to have no more than 10 stockholders.Contracting, family farms, farm businesses, farm financial performance, farm-operator household income, farm operators, farm structure, farm type, million-dollar farms, Farm Management,

Growing Farm Size and the Distribution of Farm Payments

Crop production is shifting to much larger farms. Since government commodity payments reflect production volumes for program commodities, payments are also shifting to larger farms. In turn, the operators of very large farms have substantially higher household incomes than other farm households, and as a result government commodity payments are also shifting to much higher-income households. Since the changes in farm structure appear to be ongoing, commodity payments will likely, under current policies, continue to shift to higher income households. This brief uses 2003 Agricultural Resource Management Survey (ARMS) data to detail the shifts.Farm structure, commodity programs, farm payments, farm household income, farm income, farm program payments, ERS, USDA, Agricultural and Food Policy, Industrial Organization,

Partial Hamiltonian reduction of relativistic extended objects in light-cone gauge

The elimination of the non-transversal field in the standard light-cone formulation of higher-dimensional extended objects is formulated as a Hamiltonian reduction.Comment: 11 page

Differences in Canadian and U.S. Farm Structure: What the Canadian Farm Typology Shows

Canadian and U.S. farms vary widely in size and other characteristics, ranging from very small retirement and residential farms to firms with sales in the millions. Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) and the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA’s) Economic Research Service (ERS) have each developed a farm typology to classify farms into more homogeneous groups. These typologies provide useful insights into farm structure in each country. It is difficult, however, to use the typologies to compare farm structure in Canada and the United States, because the definitions within the two typologies differ. To make direct comparisons of farm structure in the two countries the Canadian typology was applied to the farms in both nations.Crop Production/Industries, Farm Management,

Network growth model with intrinsic vertex fitness

© 2013 American Physical SocietyWe study a class of network growth models with attachment rules governed by intrinsic node fitness. Both the individual node degree distribution and the degree correlation properties of the network are obtained as functions of the network growth rules. We also find analytical solutions to the inverse, design, problems of matching the growth rules to the required (e.g., power-law) node degree distribution and more generally to the required degree correlation function. We find that the design problems do not always have solutions. Among the specific conditions on the existence of solutions to the design problems is the requirement that the node degree distribution has to be broader than a certain threshold and the fact that factorizability of the correlation functions requires singular distributions of the node fitnesses. More generally, the restrictions on the input distributions and correlations that ensure solvability of the design problems are expressed in terms of the analytical properties of their generating functions

ADM Worldvolume Geometry

We describe the dynamics of a relativistic extended object in terms of the geometry of a configuration of constant time. This involves an adaptation of the ADM formulation of canonical general relativity. We apply the formalism to the hamiltonian formulation of a Dirac-Nambu-Goto relativistic extended object in an arbitrary background spacetime.Comment: 4 pages, Latex. Uses espcrc2.sty To appear in the proceedings of the Third Conference on Constrained Dynamics and Quantum Gravity, September, 1999. To appear in Nuclear Physics B (Proceedings Supplement