Conversion to Organic Production Software (OrgPlan, OF0159)

This is the final report for Defra Project OF0159. The Organic Conversion Planner (OrgPlan) is a computer program for farmers and advisors reducing the time input necessary for planning a conversion to organic farming. Conversion planning can help to identify whether organic management is suited to the farm and potential problems during the conversion period itself. This involves an assessment of the current situation of the farm, based on which proposals for an organic 'target (endpoint)' can be developed. This includes proposed rotation(s), cropping and stocking plan for the specific farm situation and the proposals need to be tested for their technical and financial feasibility, including impact on forage supply, nutrient requirements and financial budgets. In a final step a more detailed strategy for getting from the current situation to the target situation needs to be worked out. On the basis of such a plan a farmers can make an informed choice about the feasibility of a conversion and planning can help to reduce the risk of conversion. General whole farm planning methods can be broadly split into budgeting and optimisation methods. The former uses input and output data from existing enterprises or standard data, whereas the latter uses mathematical models to determine the optimal choice of enterprises for a maximisation of a key indicator, e.g. profit. OrgPlan uses the budgeting approach, building on experience with mainly German speaking budgeting software for organic conversion. It overcomes a number of key limitations of spreadsheet based budgeting approaches in relation to access to standard enterprise data, additional support tools (e.g. rotation planner) and ease of use. The software is structured into three major sections: In Central Resources basic standard data and farm profiles are entered, viewed and adjusted, and rotations can be planned. Access is also provided to the advisory section, containing documents about organic production standards, organic managmenet notes and a software help file. It is also possible to access these from other sections of the software. In the Scenario Planning section new files for a scenario are created, where a scenario refers to a period of several years of a farm during conversion and/or under organic management. Cropping and livestock plans are generated and a first assessment of the scenario of key farm mangement indicators, nutrients and forage budgets is provided. After adding whole farm financial data the results are transferred into the Report Builder where profit and loss and cash-flow forecasts for the scenario can be generated. Reports can be viewed on screen, printed (HTML format) or exported for further analysis in other packages (spreadsheets). A key aim in developing the software was to reduce the time input needed for conversion planning. The software is windows based and follows the layout of the EMA software (developed by UH). It was programmed in Microsoft (MS) Visual Basic, using MS Access databases for the storage of data. It used results of several DEFRA funded research projects and has relevance to the Organic Conversion Information Service (OCIS). A series of nine basic steps are needed to use the software to plan conversion. These are: viewing and modifying standard enterprise data, viewing and modifying rotations, creating a farm profile, creating and planning a conversion scenario, getting first feedback on the scenario, adding whole farm financial data, planning new investment during the scenario period and viewing and printing reports and/or export data for further analysis in other packages. The basic planning tool has been released as part of the EMA 2002 software (EMA Plan). Because of the sensitive nature of the financial calculations that are the main feature of OrgPlan, further field testing of the programme in conjunction with the Organic Standard Data Collection is envisaged in the autumn of 2002 for with experienced Organic Farming Consultants

Tradition and monotheism in eastern Indonesia

Nusa Tenggara Timor, a south-eastern province of Indonesia, is populated mainly by Christians. The Alor-Pantar Archipelago has a majority of Protestant inhabitants who were baptized by Dutch Calvinists in the first half of the twentieth century. In addition, there are some coastal enclaves that have been inhabited by Muslims for centuries. In some areas, such as in the headland of Muna (Tanjung Muna) forming the northeast of Pantar Island, there is an even greater diversity of monotheistic religions, with some Catholic families living next to Protestants and Muslims. All adherers of the three religious faiths living at Tanjung Muna share core elements of the local adat, which consists of core rules relating to social behavior. It is believed that the ancestors will notice transgressions of these rules, and may use their supernatural power to punish their human descendants. In Indonesia, the term adat was first used by Muslims to distinguish the non-Islamic practices from Muslim faith (Keane 1997:260-261). This is definitely not the case in the village of Pandai at the coast of Tanjung Muna, where Islam tolerates ancestral worship. The same is true for the Catholics in the inland village of Helangdohi, who do not only tolerate but even support such customs. Some villagers from Helangdohi had become acquainted with this kind of Catholicism on the nearby island of Flores, where ancestral worship is encouraged by the missionaries of the Societas Verbi Divini (SVD). The attitude of Protestantism, at least in the Alor Archipelago, is quite the contrary of the permissive views held by Catholicism and Islam. In the 1930s the Protestant-Calvinist missionaries banned any kind of ancestral worship and destroyed most relics (Dalen 1928: Picture 1). These drastic measures demanded the disavowal of the ancestors, including the destruction of heirlooms and omitting of rituals

The indigenization of catholicism on Flores

From the very outset of European expansion, scholars have been preoccupied with the impact of proselytization and colonization on non-European societies. Anthropologists such as Margaret Mead and Bronislaw Malinowski, who witnessed these processes at the beginning of the twentieth century while at the same time benefitting from the colonial structure, were convinced that the autochthonous societies could not possibly withstand the onslaught of the dominant European cultures, and thus were doomed to vanish in the near future. The fear of losing their object of research, which had just recently been discovered, hung above the heads of the scholars like a sword of Damocles ever since the establishment of anthropology as a discipline. They felt hurried to document what seemed to be crumbling away. Behind these fears there was the notion that the indigenous cultures were comparatively static entities that had existed untouched by any external influences for many centuries, or even millennia, and were unable to change. This idea was shared by proponents of other disciplines; in religious studies, for example, up to the late 1980s the view prevailed that the contact between the great world religions and the belief systems of small, autochthonous societies doomed the latter to extinction. However, more recent studies have shown that this assumption, according to which indigenous peoples have not undergone any changes in the course of history, is untenable. It became apparent that groups supposedly living in isolation have extensive contact networks, and that migration, trade, and conquest are not privileges of modern times. Myths and oral traditions bore witness of journeys to faraway regions, new settlements founded in unknown territories, or the arrival of victorious foreigners who introduced new ways and customs and laid claim to a place of their own within society

Direct Neutrino Mass Experiments

With a mass at least six orders of magnitudes smaller than the mass of an electron -- but non-zero -- neutrinos are a clear misfit in the Standard Model of Particle Physics. On the one hand, its tiny mass makes the neutrino one of the most interesting particles, one that might hold the key to physics beyond the Standard Model. On the other hand this minute mass leads to great challenges in its experimental determination. Three approaches are currently pursued: An indirect neutrino mass determination via cosmological observables, the search for neutrinoless double $\beta$-decay, and a direct measurement based on the kinematics of single $\beta$-decay. In this paper the latter will be discussed in detail and the status and scientific reach of the current and near-future experiments will be presented.Comment: Talk presented at NuPhys2015 (London, 16-18 December 2015). 9 pages, LaTeX, 9 png figure

Early evolution of the birth cluster of the solar system

The solar system was most likely born in a star cluster containing at least 1000 stars. It is highly probable that this cluster environment influenced various properties of the solar system like its chemical composition, size and the orbital parameters of some of its constituting bodies. In the Milky Way, clusters with more than 2000 stars only form in two types - starburst clusters and leaky clusters - each following a unique temporal development in the mass-radius plane. The aim is here to determine the encounter probability in the range relevant to solar system formation for starburst or leaky cluster environments as a function of cluster age. N-body methods are used to investigate the cluster dynamics and the effect of gravitational interactions between cluster members on young solar-type stars surrounded by discs. Using the now available knowledge of the cluster density at a given cluster age it is demonstrated that in starburst clusters the central densities over the first 5Myr are so high (initially > 10^5 Msun pc^{-3}) that hardly any discs with solar system building potential would survive this phase. This makes a starburst clusters an unlikely environment for the formation of our solar system. Instead it is highly probable that the solar system formed in a leaky cluster (often classified as OB association). It is demonstrated that an encounter determining the characteristic properties existing in our solar systems most likely happened very early on (< 2Myr) in its formation history and that after 5Myr the likelihood of a solar-type star experiencing such an encounter in a leaky cluster is negligible even if it was still part of the bound remnant. This explains why the solar system could develop and maintain its high circularity later in its development.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, accepted by A&

Expectation Damages, Divisible Contracts, and Bilateral Investment

This paper examines the efficiency of expectation damages as a breach remedy in a bilateral trade setting with renegotiation and relationship-specific investment by the buyer and the seller. As demonstrated by Edlin and Reichelstein (1996), no contract that specifies only a fixed quantity and a fixed per-unit price can induce efficient investment if marginal cost is constant and deterministic. We show that this result does not extend to more general payoff functions. If both parties face the risk of breaching, the first best becomes attainable with a simple price-quantity contract

Albert's twisted field construction using division algebras with a multiplicative norm

Albert's classical construction of twisted fields generates unital division algebras out of cyclic field extensions. We apply a generalized version to unital division algebras with a multiplicative norm and give conditions for the resulting twisted algebras to be division. Four- and eight-dimensional real unital division algebras with large derivation algebras are constructed out of Hamilton's quaternion and Cayley's octonion algebra.Comment: 19 page

Is organic Farming ‘innovative’ enough for Europe?

The paper explores how organic agriculture fits into the framework of innovation systems that is becoming more widely accepted in supporting innovation also in agriculture which is faced with many societal challenges. It explores the need to better understand the role of different types of innovation and in particular the role of knowledge and how joint learning systems for sharing different types of knowledge can be developed using examples from SOLID and TP organics