Service Check on Pig and Cattle Farms - Establish the Visions

A service check for a farm is an interesting new way of advising farmers, which has proven very successful. The objective of a service check is to recognise potential improvements in the production using a holistic approach. Often a service check will try to establish the overall goals for the farmer’s family, the farmer and the farm. In order to do so, the farm is systematically analysed in order to establish strengths, weaknesses and possible paths of development. These issues are normally neglected in the day-today contact between the farmer and the usual adviser, and even far-reaching decisions are often taken without a decent analysis of the strategic goals. A service check involves a joint visit, where two experienced advisors visit the farm together. The advisors are normally an economic advisor and either a pig or cattle advisor, depending on the farm analysed. Usually, the farm’s normal advisors are not participating in the service check. The advisors bring an analysis of the economic and productivity data, and are presented to the farm. A normal service check will produce a report stating the current status, plans for the future and appointments for more specific advisory work that have been agreed upon. Despite the price of a service check, the product has been successful. Farmers achieve a better perspective of the strategic possibilities and limitations of their farm, and it becomes possible to establish realistic long-term goals for the farm development. The clarity improves the farmer’s self-confidence and the pleasure of work. Advisors are also satisfied, since the farmer will often initiate new projects after the service check, which in turn increases the demand for advisory services.Farm Management,

IceCube Neutrinos from Hadronically Powered Gamma-Ray Galaxies

In this work we use a multi-messenger approach to determine if the high energy diffuse neutrino flux observed by the IceCube Observatory can originate from $\gamma$-ray sources powered by Cosmic Rays interactions with gas. Typical representatives of such sources are Starburst and Ultra-Luminous Infrared Galaxies. Using the three most recent calculations of the non-blazar contribution to the extragalactic $\gamma$-ray background measured by the Fermi-LAT collaboration, we find that a hard power-law spectrum with spectral index $\alpha \leq 2.12$ is compatible with all the estimations for the allowed contribution from non-blazar sources, within 1$\sigma$. Using such a spectrum we are able to interpret the IceCube results, showing that various classes of hadronically powered $\gamma$-ray galaxies can provide the dominant contribution to the astrophysical signal above 100 TeV and about half of the contribution to the energy flux between 10-100 TeV. With the addition of neutrinos from the Galactic plane, it is possible to saturate the IceCube signal at high energy. Our result shows that these sources are still well motivated candidates.Comment: Accepted for publication on JCA

Astrophysical neutrinos flavored with Beyond the Standard Model physics

We systematically study the allowed parameter space for the flavor composition of astrophysical neutrinos measured at Earth, including beyond the Standard Model theories at production, during propagation, and at detection. One motivation is to illustrate the discrimination power of the next-generation neutrino telescopes such as IceCube-Gen2. We identify several examples that lead to potential deviations from the standard neutrino mixing expectation such as significant sterile neutrino production at the source, effective operators modifying the neutrino propagation at high energies, dark matter interactions in neutrino propagation, or non-standard interactions in Earth matter. IceCube-Gen2 can exclude about 90% of the allowed parameter space in these cases, and hence will allow to efficiently test and discriminate models. More detailed information can be obtained from additional observables such as the energy-dependence of the effect, fraction of electron antineutrinos at the Glashow resonance, or number of tau neutrino events.Comment: 21 pages, 9 figures, 3 tables, v2: references added, typos corrected, conclusion unchanged, matches final version in PR