An Economic Analysis of Replacing Existing Bermudagrass Stands with Tifton 85 Bermudagrass for Beef Cow-Calf, Stocker and Hay Production

Comparisons of simulated NPV for Coastal and Tifton 85 bermuda-grass using experimental data, current input prices and historical hay and feeder cattle prices indicates that many producers would benefit by adopting this new cultivar. Cow-calf producers would benefit the most followed by stocker/replacement heifer producers and finally hay producers. When risk-aversion is introduced into the model, all cow-calf and stocker producers regardless of the level of risk-aversion should consider adopting T85. Moderately or extremely risk-averse hay producers would consider adopting T85, while those that are slightly risk-averse would be indifferent.Crop Production/Industries, Risk and Uncertainty,

WILLINGNESS TO PARTICIPATE IN A BEEF CATTLE MARKETING COOPERATIVE

Based on the results of a 1999 survey of Mississippi Beef Cattle Producers, producers were willing to invest $1.66 per head marketed in a beef cattle marketing cooperative. Factors that had the largest positive impact on WTP were producers who were willing to permanently identify all of their cows and calves and producers who were willing to accept prices negotiated by the cooperative. Negative factors included producer willingness to implement a pre-weaning health management program and the percentage of replacement heifers purchased through regular auctions.Livestock Production/Industries, Marketing,

Baleage Decision Tool for Beef Cattle Producers

This article describes a bale-wrapping decision tool designed for use by Extension educators, lenders, and beef cattle producers. Use of bale-wrapping machines reduces storage losses and increases nutritional content of stored forages. This software tool allows users to estimate costs of production associated with purchase of a bale-wrapping machine and how the purchase decision affects the potential cost savings for the cattle operation. It is available to interested users in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

An Economic Analysis of Three Stockering Systems in the Southeastern United States

Deterministic and probabilistic models were developed to calculate returns over variable costs for three stockering systems in the Southeastern United States. Purchasing 350 pound calves in October-November and selling calves weighing 750 pounds in March-April using cool-season forages was determined to be the superior system in terms of projected returns

An Economic Analysis of Replacing Existing Bermudagrass Stands with Tifton 85 Bermudagrass for Beef Cow-Calf, Stocker and Hay Production

Comparisons of simulated NPV for Coastal and Tifton 85 bermuda-grass using experimental data, current input prices and historical hay and feeder cattle prices indicates that many producers would benefit by adopting this new cultivar. Cow-calf producers would benefit the most followed by stocker/replacement heifer producers and finally hay producers. When risk-aversion is introduced into the model, all cow-calf and stocker producers regardless of the level of risk-aversion should consider adopting T85. Moderately or extremely risk-averse hay producers would consider adopting T85, while those that are slightly risk-averse would be indifferent

Conventional Versus Pasture-Based Dairy Systems: An Economic Analysis

Due to volatility in milk and feed prices, which has reduced profits, Southeastern U.S. dairy producers are considering production systems that can generate greater profits with lower capital requirements. This paper estimates economic costs and returns of three types of dairy systems used in the Southeast: conventional confinement, mostly grazing, and a hybrid system

WILLINGNESS TO PARTICIPATE IN A BEEF CATTLE MARKETING COOPERATIVE

Based on the results of a 1999 survey of Mississippi Beef Cattle Producers, producers were willing to invest $1.66 per head marketed in a beef cattle marketing cooperative. Factors that had the largest positive impact on WTP were producers who were willing to permanently identify all of their cows and calves and producers who were willing to accept prices negotiated by the cooperative. Negative factors included producer willingness to implement a pre-weaning health management program and the percentage of replacement heifers purchased through regular auctions

CATTLE PRODUCER ATTITUDES TOWARDS ALTERNATIVE PRODUCTION AND MARKETING PRACTICES

This paper reports the results of a comprehensive survey of Mississippi beef cattle producers regarding their current production and marketing practices and their attitudes toward and willingness to employ alternative production and marketing practices