Improving Agricultural Irrigation on the Balkhab River, Afghanistan

In Afghanistan, where 80% of the population is rural, irrigated agriculture is important for satisfying subsistence needs. While most of the irrigated agriculture is fed by diversion canal systems which tap surface flows, legal and physical water infrastructure in the region is generally poor. A math programming model is used to optimize irrigation strategies under different water-availability and policy scenarios. It is found that the construction of a reservoir could increase net revenues to a representative farming community by up to 30%. However, even greater benefits may result from increasing distribution efficiencies, depending on the initial level of conveyance losses. Further, property rights schemes may be implemented to distribute wealth more evenly through various zones at minimal cost to the agricultural community as a whole. These results may prove useful to policymakers or water authorities in reestablishing water rights.linear programming, irrigation, Afghanistan, Agricultural and Food Policy, Community/Rural/Urban Development, International Development,

Het onderwijs van Mozes en het onderwijs van de ekklesia

Rede ter gelegenheid van het afscheid als universitair hoofddocent Theologiegeschiedenis en bijzonder hoogleraar op de Miskotte/Breukelman-leerstoel voor de hermeneutiek van de Bijbel op 7 mei 2019 te Amsterdam

Deze is een en enig : over de taak de singulariteit van de Naam te respecteren

Inaugurele rede uitgesproken bij de aanvaarding van het ambt van bijzonder hoogleraar voor de Bijzondere leerstoel Miskotte/Breukelman voor de theologische hermeneutiek van de Bijbel vanwege de Miskotte/Breukelman-Stichting voor de theologische hermeneutiek van de Bijbelse grondwoorden aan de Protestantse Theologische Universiteit op 5 oktober 2012 te Amsterdam

Conversations with non-choir farmers: Implications for conservation adoption. Report for the Walton Family Foundation

The following report documents the results and implications for the study, “Conversations with non-choir farmers: Implications for conservation adoption”. We conducted 10 in-person focus groups with farmers (IN=5; IA=3; IL=2) and three online focus groups with non-operating landowners (NOLs) who own land in Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa. This research sought to answer the following research questions: 1) What are viable strategies beyond what WFF is currently investing in to promote agricultural practices that that reduce nutrient runoff? 2) How and under what conditions can policies help to change farmer and landowner behavior? What are potential barriers, particularly resistance from the agricultural sector? 3) What do Corn Belt farmers think about the limits to voluntary conservation? Do they see a need to think beyond voluntary conservation? 4) What suggestions do Corn Belt farmers have for how to motivate wide-spread adoption of conservation practices to improve water quality? 5) How could new policies and incentives be tied to existing funding streams (e.g., Farm Bill) or other financial incentives? The focus group questions were designed to foster participants’ discussions of their perceptions on seven topics related to the research questions: 1) regulation; 2) conservation barriers; 3) market-based policies; 4) conservation targeting; 5) motivations for widespread conservation adoption; 6) communication networks; and 7) certification programs and private sector funding for conservation. The following pages include data from the 13 focus groups – 10 with farmers and 3 with NOLs. We conclude with implications of our findings

Public-private partnerships for biosecurity: an opportunity for risk sharing

Private efforts to prevent and control biological pests and infectious diseases can be a public good, and so incentivising private biosecurity management actions is both desirable and problematic. Compensation contracts can encourage biosecurity efforts, provide support against the collapse of economic sectors, and create an insurance network. We conceptualise a novel biosecurity instrument relying on formal compensation private–public partnerships using contract theory. Our framework explains how the public sector can harness increased private biosecurity measures by making payments to agents which depend both on their performance and that of the other stakeholders. Doing so allows the government to spread the risk across signatory agents. The framework also improves our understanding of government involvement due to public effects of biosecurity, influenced by the private agents’ capacity to derive private benefit from their own efforts on monitoring and control. Lastly, these theoretical results provide a foundation for further study of contractual responsibility sharing for pest management

Using carbon offsets to fund agricultural conservation practices in a working-lands setting

The nitrogen cascade concept indicates that agriculture serves as a significant link between emissions of the potent greenhouse gas (GHG) nitrous oxide and losses of nitrate to surface waters. Conservation practices have the potential to exploit this link, as their implementation is found to reduce fluxes of GHGs and nonpoint source (NPS) water pollution. Several studies have recognized this link and have documented the potential to improve environmental quality through the use of programs which retire land, the funding for which can be offset by the sale of carbon credits. However, the ability to use land for both agricultural production and environmental conservation is important. As such, this study examines the intensely-farmed Wildcat Creek Watershed in West-Central Indiana to evaluate the potential for implementing agricultural conservation practices to reduce NPS water pollutants and fluxes of GHGs in a working-lands setting. The extent to which carbon pricing can affect practice implementation costs and the optimal distribution of these practices throughout the watershed is also explored. Results from this study indicate that carbon offsets can sharply reduce conservation practice implementation costs and therefore have the potential to reduce greater amounts of NPS pollution for a given cost of implementation. However, the extent to which various practices can be used to abate NPS pollutants and GHGs is heavily dependent on the implementation period considered. Further, this study found that fertilizer management, which is relatively difficult to enforce in practice, significantly influenced the optimal allocation of practices. This study provides a novel framework for analyzing the impacts of conservation practices that may prove useful in formulating innovative policy tools aimed at improving environmental quality in multiple environmental media. The findings of this study indicate that the potential exists to use carbon offsets to improve water quality and reduce GHG fluxes in a working-lands setting

A Study of the Personal Differences of Children of Service Personnel Attending Public Schools

Statement of the problem. The purpose of this study was twofold: (1) to discover how service pupils compared with other pupils in mental maturity, scholastic achievement, and preference tests; and (2) to ascertain if certain factors in the total-life situation of the service pupils could possibly account for any difference in the test scores