Smaller scale New Zealand dairy farmers: long term plans and key challenges

Farmer wellbeing has been defined as “a dynamic process that gives people a sense of how their lives are evolving” (Nimpagariste & Culver, 2010). In order to support and enhance the wellbeing of farmers in New Zealand, the farmers’ goals, future plans and challenges to their plans all need to be understood. A particular group of interest is smaller scale dairy farmers. The average size of dairy farms in developed agricultural nations is increasing and New Zealand is no different. A high proportion (62%) of NZ dairy herds are smaller scale, milking less than 400 cows at peak. Their wellbeing, now and in the future, is important to the New Zealand dairy industry as a whole. Consequently, the aim of this study is to develop an understanding of smaller-scale dairy farmers’ future goals, plans and challenges so that recommendations can be made to enhance and support their wellbeing in the future. Farms who peak milked less than 400 cows were surveyed via telephone. A total of 346 surveys were completed, in Taranaki (n=103), the Waikato (n=144) and Northland (n=99). The majority of respondents’ were owner-operators (75%), male (67%), born and bred in a rural area (79%), and between 40 and 60 years old (57%). Overall, the mean farm size was 97ha, with 240 cows producing 86,789kgMS with 0.83 of a full time employee. Respondents’ had high (67%) equity levels in their businesses and a third (35%) had non-farming investments. Farmers’ most likely future investments were related to their current farming business, that is reducing debt to very low levels and increasing production by more than 10%. Based on farmers future plans and challenges reported and discussed in this study, it is clear the smaller scale dairy farmers would like knowledge and assistance in five key areas; succession, regulation and compliance, staff, technology and cash-flow/profitability. This report concludes with suggestions for each of these areas, which has the potential to maintain or increase the wellbeing of smaller scale dairy farmers in New Zealand. [Executive summary]DairyNZ Ltd, Ministry for Primary Industry (NZ

Fractional Brownian Motion as a Differentiable Generalized Gaussian Process

Brownian motion can be characterized as a generalized random process and, as such, has a generalized derivative whose covariance functional is the delta function. In a similar fashion, fractional Brownian motion can be interpreted as a generalized random process and shown to possess a generalized derivative. The resulting process is a generalized Gaussian process with mean functional zero and covariance functional that can be interpreted as a fractional integral or fractional derivative of the delta-function.Brownian motion, fractional Brownian motion, fractional derivative, covariance functional, delta function, generalized derivative, generalized Gaussian process

All Fall Down: The Demise of the New Dance Group and the ‘‘Highest’’ Stage of Communism

Part II of Performing Communism in the American Dance: Culture, Politics and the New Dance Grou

Performing Communism in the American Dance: Culture, Politics and the New Dance Group

In 1931 the Workers Cultural Federation declared: ‘‘Art is a weapon.’’ Within six months the New Dance Group (NDG) premiered in New York City. The following year it appeared as a member of the Worker's Dance League and deployed the slogan ‘‘The Dance is a Weapon of the Class Struggle.’’ The NDG program notes explained: ‘‘The working class is growing in number, growing in strength, and growing in knowledge. It is simultaneously developing itself and its weapons. One of its most important weapons is our modern revolutionary dance.’’ The NDG and WDL dancers brought Communist propaganda tools to cultural projects

Innovation and Tradition: A Survey of Intellectual Property and Technology Legal Clinics

For artists, nonprofits, community organizations and small-business clients of limited means, securing intellectual property (IP) rights and getting counseling involving patent, copyright and trademark law are critical to their success and growth. These clients need expert IP and technology legal assistance, but very often cannot afford services in the legal marketplace. In addition, legal services and state bar pro bono programs have generally been ill-equipped to assist in these more specialized areas. An expanding community of IP and Technology clinics has emerged across the country to meet these needs. But while law review articles have described and examined other sectors of clinical legal education, there has not been an article to date that examines the rise and the role of such clinics. This is an important need to fill. With student and client and law firm demand for IP and Technology clinics, law schools want information about existing programs, and existing programs want information about the innova- tions of other clinics and collaboration opportunities. In addition, the traditional clinical community wants to ensure that these new pro- grams build on the strengths of the original founding clinics. This article distills the results of a comprehensive survey of seventy-two distinct IP and Technology clinics into themes that analyze the focus and aspirations of this new clinical community. It takes stock of what IP and Technology clinics were founded to accomplish, how and what they are teaching students, and what clients and missions drive them. It highlights some individual innovations to inspire the community to continue to grow and change. It concludes by assessing what these clinics accomplish, how they are faring on these goals and the role they may play in the future of clinical legal education and experiential learning more generally

The Strange Commodity of Cultural Exchange: Martha Graham and the State Department on Tour, 1955-1987

The study of Martha Graham's State Department tours and her modern dance demonstrates that between 1955 and 1987 a series of Cold Wars required a steady product that could meet "informational" propaganda needs over time. After World War II, dance critics mitigated the prewar influence of the German and Japanese modernist artists to create a freed and humanist language because modern dance could only emerge from a nation that was free, and not from totalitarian regimes. Thus the modern dance became American, while at the same time it represented a universal man. During the Cold War, the aging of Martha Graham's dance, from innovative and daring to traditional and even old-fashioned, mirrored the nation's transition from a newcomer that advertised itself as the postwar home of freedom, modernity, and Western civilization to an established power that attempted to set international standards of diplomacy. Graham and her works, read as texts alongside State Department country plans, United States Information Agency publicity, other documentary evidence, and oral histories, reveal a complex matrix of relationships between government agencies and the artists they supported, as well as foundations, private individuals, corporations, country governments, and representatives of business and culture. Because four elements of Graham's modern dance created by her biography can be traced back to ideas of American identity, human universalism, Asian culture, and the Western canon of ancient Greek, European, and biblical texts, the State Department deployed her work throughout Europe and Asia to transmit ideas about America with choreography that could demonstrate cultural convergences, or the merging of American modernist techniques with host country elements. This targeted strategy of advertisement for international leaders, which translated host-country traditions with a universal language of the modern dance, made in America, argued that the United States would and could partner with the nation states Graham visited in order to achieve foreign policy agendas