State Cooperative Councils: What are the Local Member Cooperatives Looking For?

State cooperative councils serve a valuable role for local cooperatives by providing services including education, legislative monitoring and lobbying, and promotion of the cooperative form of business. This paper outlines the specific challenges that state councils are experiencing in today's changing agribusiness environment. The results of a survey of members of the Colorado Cooperative Council are reported. Logit analysis is performed to identify the factors contributing to the cooperatives' satisfaction with the state council and the cooperatives' use of the council's services. The paper concludes with suggestions for action by state councils.Agribusiness,

By Name United, By Sex Divided: A Brief Analysis of the Current Crisis Facing the Anglican Communion

The current controversies in relation to homosexuality - which emanated from the western quarters but quickly engulfed the entire Anglican Communion - highlight two significant issues. In our view, the first issue, regarding the 'religious citizenship' of lesbian and gay Christians, is generally a western concern. The second issue pertaining to the prospect of the disintegration of the Anglican Communion, however, needs to be examined within a global context. On the first issue, we argue that, since the contemporary western religious landscape (and society in general) prioritizes the authority of the self rather than that of religious institution/tradition, the traditional religious discourse that marginalizes lesbian and gay Christians is undermined by an increasingly sophisticated reverse discourse. This reverse discourse, equipped with lesbian and gay affirming theology and documentation of lived experiences, also converges with contemporary cultural (secular) discourse of human rights and personal liberty, which values social diversity, including sexual difference. We believe that the social and political currency of the reverse discourse will proliferate, thus eclipsing the traditional discourse that appears increasingly out of step with contemporary western socio-cultural reality. On the second issue, we welcome the heightened significance and relevance of (local) culture and Christianity in the debate. We argue that the decentralization (i.e. de-westernization) of the Anglican Communion should be welcomed, for there are various versions of Christianity, the conception and practice of which are closely informed by local cultures. Thus, to force the production of a unified Anglican response to moral or social issues that are differently defined across cultures may prove counter-productive.Anglican; Belief; Christian; Church; Gay; Homosexuality; Identity; Lesbian; Priest

Harvest weed seed control: is there a role in northern region farming systems?

Harvest weed seed control (HWSC) is a new approach which targets weed seed removal and/or destruction during the crop harvest operation. The success of HWSC is dependant upon weed seed retention at harvest. To identify and define the potential value of HWSC in northern farming systems, we conducted a field survey. In total 1400 transects across 70 paddocks assessed weed distribution, density and seed production at harvest time in wheat, chickpea and sorghum crops. Seventy weed species were identified, of which many had large seed numbers retained at crop harvest. The most prevalent included common sowthistle, flaxleaf fleabane, awnless barnyard grass, wild oat, and African turnip weed. Our field survey has shown there is a role for HWSC in the northern farming system. Therefore the efficacy of specific HWSC systems on problematic weeds should be evaluated in the northern region

Solar Flare Impulsive Phase Emission Observed with SDO/EVE

Differential emission measures (DEMs) during the impulsive phase of solar flares were constructed using observations from the EUV Variability Experiment (EVE) and the Markov-Chain Monte Carlo method. Emission lines from ions formed over the temperature range log T = 5.8 - 7.2 allow the evolution of the DEM to be studied over a wide temperature range at 10s cadence. The technique was applied to several M- and X-class flares, where impulsive phase EUV emission is observable in the disk-integrated EVE spectra from emission lines formed up to 3 - 4 MK, and we use spatially-unresolved EVE observations to infer the thermal structure of the emitting region. For the nine events studied the DEMs exhibited a two component distribution during the impulsive phase, a low temperature component with peak temperature of 1 - 2 MK, and a broad high temperature one from 7 - 30 MK. A bimodal high temperature component is also found for several events, with peaks at 8 and 25 MK during the impulsive phase. The origin of the emission was verified using AIA images to be the flare ribbons and footpoints, indicating that the constructed DEMs represent the spatially-average thermal structure of the chromospheric flare emission during the impulsive phase.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in Ap