Maintaining a way of life: trials and tribulations of farmers market families

Never before in our nation’s history has there been so many ways for consumers to purchase food. From grocery stores, to super centers such as Wal-Mart and Cosco, convenience stores, online purchases, community supported agriculture (CSA), and farmers markets, Americans have a multitude of venues to choose from. Although many Americans currently purchase their foods from grocery stores, a growing number of them are buying locally at their farmers’ markets and from CSAs. As the sustainability movement takes a greater foothold in the American household, local products and local foods are becoming ever more important and prevalent. Yet with all of the statistics surrounding local agriculture, the human element is often lost. A majority of small farmers and their spouses, often the ones who sell at a local level, have to work full time both on and off farm to support their families and farms. This case study examines the professional lives of five local farm families who choose to sell their products at the Fayetteville, Arkansas farmers market. It seeks to understand farmers’ reasons for farming and selling locally, as well as their biggest challenges and rewards. In addition, it seeks to fill gaps in literature, begin to develop an understanding of this phenomenon, and shed light on why these farmers choose to sell at a local level

Benchmarking: Understanding the Basics

It is often stated that those who benchmark do not have to reinvent the wheel (Parker, 1996). By following others one can make improvements and not focus on stale ideas. Benchmarking at first glance may be mistaken for a copycat form of developing strategic plans and for making improvements within an organization. This is not true. Benchmarking is a process that allows organizations to improve upon existing ideas. In order to eliminate myths and misconceptions about benchmarking it is important to know exactly what benchmarking is, the different types of benchmarking, the criticisms of benchmarking, and the ethical practices concerning benchmarking

Influence of nonmartensitic transformation products on mechanical properties of tempered martensite

The influence of nonmartensitic transformations products on the mechanical properties of tempered martensite is presented for samples of a SAE 4340 steel, partially isothermally transformed to specific high-temperature transformation products and quenched and tempered to hardness values of from 25 to 40 Rockwell c. The effects of upper bainite in amounts of 1,5, 10, 20 and 50 percent, of 5 percent ferrite, and of 5 percent pearlite on the tensile, impact, and fatigue properties are evaluated. (author

A fatigue multi-site cracks model using coalescence, short and long crack growth laws, for anodized aluminum alloys

It has been shown that decrease of the fatigue life of aluminium alloys treated with anodization can be explained by the degradation of surface condition due to pickling. In order to predict fatigue life of anodized aluminium alloys, a multi-site crack growth model is developed by considering the pickling pits sites as initial flaws from which fatigue cracks develop. A map of the pickled surface is built from topography measurement with a contact profilometer. Then the pits are detected and their sizes are defined (depth, length and width). At the beginning of the calculation, a short crack growth law is used for crack having depths less than grain size. Then Paris long crack growth law is used. The coalescence of cracks is considered when their lengths increased by its crack tip plastic zone are large enough to interact with other neighbouring short cracks. The fatigue life is calculated for Kmax achieving 70 % KIC

Maintaining a way of life: trials and tribulations of farmers’ market families

Never before in our nation’s history has there been so many ways for consumers to purchase food. From grocery stores, to super centers such as Wal-Mart and Costco, convenience stores, online purchases, community supported agriculture (CSA), and farmers’ markets, Americans have a multitude of venues to choose from. Although many Americans currently purchase their foods from grocery stores, a growing number of them are buying locally at their farmers’ markets and from CSAs. As the sustainability movement takes a greater foothold in the American household, local products and local foods are becoming ever more important and prevalent. Yet with all of the statistics surrounding local agriculture, the human element is often lost. A majority of small farmers and their spouses, often the ones who sell at a local level, have to work full time both on and off farm to support their families and farms. This case study examines the professional lives of five local farm families who choose to sell their products at the Fayetteville, Arkansas farmers’ market. It seeks to understand farmers’ reasons for farming and selling locally, as well as their biggest challenges and rewards. In addition, it seeks to fill gaps in literature regarding farmers’ motivations for selling at a local level

Loops under Strategies ... Continued

While there are many approaches for automatically proving termination of term rewrite systems, up to now there exist only few techniques to disprove their termination automatically. Almost all of these techniques try to find loops, where the existence of a loop implies non-termination of the rewrite system. However, most programming languages use specific evaluation strategies, whereas loop detection techniques usually do not take strategies into account. So even if a rewrite system has a loop, it may still be terminating under certain strategies. Therefore, our goal is to develop decision procedures which can determine whether a given loop is also a loop under the respective evaluation strategy. In earlier work, such procedures were presented for the strategies of innermost, outermost, and context-sensitive evaluation. In the current paper, we build upon this work and develop such decision procedures for important strategies like leftmost-innermost, leftmost-outermost, (max-)parallel-innermost, (max-)parallel-outermost, and forbidden patterns (which generalize innermost, outermost, and context-sensitive strategies). In this way, we obtain the first approach to disprove termination under these strategies automatically.Comment: In Proceedings IWS 2010, arXiv:1012.533

Domain Switching as a Toughening Mechanism in Tetragonal Zirconia

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/65640/1/j.1151-2916.1988.tb05943.x.pd

Identification of plastic constitutive parameters at large deformations from three dimensional displacement fields

The aim of this paper is to provide a general procedure to extract the constitutive parameters of a plasticity model starting from displacement measurements and using the Virtual Fields Method. This is a classical inverse problem which has been already investigated in the literature, however several new features are developed here. First of all the procedure applies to a general three-dimensional displacement field which leads to large plastic deformations, no assumptions are made such as plane stress or plane strain although only pressure-independent plasticity is considered. Moreover the equilibrium equation is written in terms of the deviatoric stress tensor that can be directly computed from the strain field without iterations. Thanks to this, the identification routine is much faster compared to other inverse methods such as finite element updating. The proposed method can be a valid tool to study complex phenomena which involve severe plastic deformation and where the state of stress is completely triaxial, e.g. strain localization or necking occurrence. The procedure has been validated using a three dimensional displacement field obtained from a simulated experiment. The main potentialities as well as a first sensitivity study on the influence of measurement errors are illustrated

Climate and southern Africa's water-energy-food nexus

In southern Africa, the connections between climate and the water-energy-food nexus are strong. Physical and socioeconomic exposure to climate is high in many areas and in crucial economic sectors. Spatial interdependence is also high, driven for example, by the regional extent of many climate anomalies and river basins and aquifers that span national boundaries. There is now strong evidence of the effects of individual climate anomalies, but associations between national rainfall and Gross Domestic Product and crop production remain relatively weak. The majority of climate models project decreases in annual precipitation for southern Africa, typically by as much as 20% by the 2080s. Impact models suggest these changes would propagate into reduced water availability and crop yields. Recognition of spatial and sectoral interdependencies should inform policies, institutions and investments for enhancing water, energy and food security. Three key political and economic instruments could be strengthened for this purpose; the Southern African Development Community, the Southern African Power Pool, and trade of agricultural products amounting to significant transfers of embedded water

Eliciting a predatory response in the eastern corn snake (Pantherophis guttatus) using live and inanimate sensory stimuli: implications for managing invasive populations

North America's Eastern corn snake (Pantherophis guttatus) has been introduced to several islands throughout the Caribbean and Australasia where it poses a significant threat to native wildlife. Invasive snake control programs often involve trapping with live bait, a practice that, as well as being costly and labour intensive, raises welfare and ethical concerns. This study assessed corn snake response to live and inanimate sensory stimuli in an attempt to inform possible future trapping of the species and the development of alternative trap lures. We exposed nine individuals to sensory cues in the form of odour, visual, vibration and combined stimuli and measured the response (rate of tongue-flick [RTF]). RTF was significantly higher in odour and combined cues treatments, and there was no significant difference in RTF between live and inanimate cues during odour treatments. Our findings suggest chemical cues are of primary importance in initiating predation and that an inanimate odour stimulus, absent of simultaneous visual and vibratory cues, is a potential low-cost alternative trap lure for the control of invasive corn snake populations