PREDICTING FEEDING COST OF GAIN WITH MORE PRECISION

Costs during the feeding period, commonly summarized as "feeding cost of gain", are primary determinants of cattle feeding profits. This study provides a method of generalizing information available at placement time into a suitable feeding cost of gain prediction, so that feeders and ranchers can make more informed placement decisions.Cattle-Feeding, Feeding-Cost-Of-Gain, Industrial Organization, Livestock Production/Industries,

Archaeological perspectives on prehistoric conservation in western North America

The archaeological record represents a potentially critical source of information on past relationships between human hunters and populations of game animals. Archaeological research in the last 40–50 years has produced two alternative views on these relationships: one that Native people were knowledgeable, benevolent conservators of game and an alternative that suggests that they depleted and suppressed game populations through overhunting. A brief review of the history of this research shows that neither position is well-supported by empirical facts and that researchers have demonstrated a certain overzealousness in attempting to support one or the other of these interpretations. The facts are that after more than 13,000 years of non-conservative hunting, game populations were still extremely high across North America. This suggests that populations of Native hunters were relatively low, and that the former productivity of North American ecosystems may be under-estimated by modern conservators

Fire in the Cane Field: the Federal Invasion of Louisiana and Texas, January 1861-January 1863

The Civil War Comes to Louisiana This is the first in a series of four books on the Civil War in Louisiana and parts of Texas that author Donald S. Frazier calls his Louisiana Quadrille. As explained in the preface, he coined the term because the maneuverings by opposing armies ...

Culture or Adaptation: Milling Stone Reconsidered

Of interest to D. L. True throughout his career was the California Milling Stone Horizon, the artifact complex dominated by handstones, millingslabs, and crude core tools most frequently associated with the early Holocene in southern California. The basic Milling Stone pattern, identified in 1929 by David Banks Rogers in the Santa Barbara Channel and formally defined by Treganza (1950) and Wallace (1955), was brought to the attention of American archaeologists outside of California by Wallace (1954) and True (1958). Over the next 30 years, D. L. True authored a number of articles and reports on Milling Stone (Basgall and True 1985; True 1980; True and Baumhoff 1982, 1985; True and Beemer 1982; True et al. 1979) in which he described regional variants and refined the typological definitions of important artifacts. Also during this period, D. L. was not shy about bringing Milling Stone into the seminar room, often forcing theoretically-oriented archaeology students of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s to acknowledge their inability to distinguish artifacts from non-artifacts. Not surprisingly, nearly every significant synthetic treatment of Milling Stone in the last two decades was authored by either one of True\u27s students (Basgall and True 1985; Hildebrandt 1983; McGuire and Hildebrandt 1994; Jones 1996) or a student of his students (Fitzgerald in Fitzgerald and Jones 1999; Fitzgerald 2000). As a result of these papers, and several by True\u27s contemporaries (e.g., Wallace 1978; Warren 1967), Milling Stone has emerged as one the best known early complexes in western North America and it has been discussed in reference to a series of different issues raised by a succession of theoretical paradigms. One issue that developed with the emergence of processual archaeology concerns the basic organizational foundation underlying the Milling Stone complex. D. L. True (at least early in his career) and his contemporaries felt that Milling Stone represented an archaeological culture - a patterned imprint in the material record that might reflect a cultural system of beliefs, values and other ideas shared by members of a society or societies. This notion was all but buried by the ecological theories put forth by the new archaeology that grew and flourished concurrently with D. L. True\u27s career. With the paradigm of the New Archaeology in place, Milling Stone became an adaptation - a rational, logical adjustment of technology and subsistence made by terminal Pleistocene/early Holocene peoples to the environment of southern California. As someone who has contributed to the notion of Milling Stone as adaptation (e.g., Jones 1991: 435-436,1992, 1996), I\u27d like to revisit this issue and argue, contrary to my earlier writings, there are compelling reasons to consider Milling Stone as an archaeological culture

FUTURES-BASED PRICE FORECASTS FOR AGRICULTURAL PRODUCERS AND BUSINESSES

The forecasting accuracy of five competing naïve and futures-based localized cash price forecasts is determined. The third-week's price each month from 1987-96 is forecasted from several vantage points. Commodities examine include those relevant to Midwest producers: the major grains, slaughter steers, slaughter hogs, several classes of feeder cattle, cull cows, and sows. Relative forecasting accuracy across forecast method is compared using regression models of forecast error. The traditional forecast method deferred futures plus historical basis has the greatest accuracy- even for cull cows. Adding complexity to forecasts, such as including regression models to capture nonlinear bases or biases in futures markets, does not improve accuracy.Demand and Price Analysis,

External impacts on internal dynamics: Effects of paleoclimatic and demographic variability on acorn exploitation along the Central California coast

book chapterResearch into human-environment interaction in California prehistory often focuses on either the internal dynamics of adaptive decisions or the external impacts of environmental change. While both processes were surely driving prehistoric variability, integrating these approaches is not altogether straightforward. Here we outline an inclusive approach examining the exploitation of acorn habitats in Central California. Acorns were critically important to many ethnographic groups in Native California, but the intensive use of acorns appears to be a Late Holocene phenomenon. Most research approaches the increased reliance on acorns as a process governed by internal dynamics linked to demographically-driven resource intensification, but there are strong reasons to believe that climatic variability also structured acorn use. Here we link internal and external human-environmental dynamics through a formal behavioral ecological model. This model provides clear predictions that can be used to identify departures from expected internal dynamics linked to external factors driven by paleoenvironmental change. Results show that prehistoric occupation along the central California coast shifts into interior oak-dominated regions with increasing population densities, consistent with model expectations of internally-driven resource intensification. However, acorn use is also affected by climate: foragers are less likely to live in productive acorn habitats during periods of drought. These findings show that neither internal nor external patterns can completely account for variability in prehistoric decisions, but that integrating these through formal ecological models can provide insights into the external impacts on internal dynamics that structure broad patterns in prehistory

Environmental productivity predicts migration, demographic, and linguistic patterns in prehistoric California

Global patterns of ethnolinguistic diversity vary tremendously. Some regions show very little variation even across vast expanses, whereas others exhibit dense mosaics of different languages spoken alongside one another. Compared with the rest of Native North America, prehistoric California exemplified the latter. Decades of linguistic, genetic, and archaeological research have produced detailed accounts of the migrations that aggregated to build California’s diverse ethnolinguistic mosaic, but there have been few have attempts to explain the process underpinning these migrations and why such a mosaic did not develop elsewhere. Here we show that environmental productivity predicts both the order of migration events and the population density recorded at contact. The earliest colonizers occupied the most suitable habitats along the coast, whereas subsequent Mid–Late Holocene migrants settled in more marginal habitats. Other Late Holocene patterns diverge from this trend, reflecting altered dynamics linked to food storage and increased sedentism. Through repeated migration events, incoming populations replaced resident populations occurring at lower densities in lower-productivity habitats, thereby resulting in the fragmentation of earlier groups and the development of one of the most diverse ethnolinguistic patterns in the Americas. Such a process may account for the distribution of ethnolinguistic diversity worldwide