Ohio Soil Test Summary 1971-72

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Pricing Linkages Between Added Value Levels Of The Beef Industry: A Systems Approach

Agricultural commodities, and in particular the livestock industry, experiences cycles in prices, demand, and supply conditions.  Large variations can result from a variety of factors which influence the regularity, magnitude, and the severity of the cycles.  In the last few years the U.S. Livestock industry has suffered through hard financial times.  Grass roots organizations such as WORC have accused the packers for using their economic power gained from concentration and the use of captive supplies for low prices at the slaughter and cow-calf levels.  To compound the issue IBP, the largest beef packer, with 33 percent of the beef kill is for sale and has been bid on by other packers, potentially concentrating the industry more and reducing the number of bidders for slaughter cattle.  The article found that the inefficiencies and price distortion in the value system were not at the packer level, but rather the retail level and between the feedlot level and the cow-calf levels.  Because of changing marketing arrangements, price discovery issues in the concentrated markets needs to be resolved before suspicion will disappear

Food waste biorefinery advocating circular economy : bioethanol and distilled beverage from sweet potato

The exponential growth rate of the global population has been causing a threat to finite resources and also increasing the amount of waste generated. The global quantitative food waste for tubers is 45% per year, which in Brazil would amount to 350,000 tons of sweet potato wasted annually. Food waste causes 10% of the emissions of greenhouse gases. In this work, food waste biorefineries are the proposed solution. Integrated processing via a combination of different technologies to produce both ethanol and distilled beverage was evaluated to valorize sweet potato waste profitably within the circular economy concept. No works concerning the integrated production of both products simulating different real market scenarios were found. Five different scenarios varying the production percentage of each product were evaluated. The higher the production of the distilled beverage, the more profitable the scenarios are. Economic results began to be positive when the production for sale of each product reaches 40%, plus 20% of ethanol for domestic consumption. The scenario with 80% of beverage production presented NPV of US$ 1,078,500.18, IRR of 51%, and discounted payback of 1.06 years. The sweet potato waste biorefinery is a sustainable model and contributes to the development of the agriculture and food sector by providing new businesses and consequent job creation. It also leads to the reduction of greenhouse emissions by producing renewable resources and marketable products, thus reaching the goals of the circular economy

Prediction of sulfur content in diesel fuel using fluorescence spectroscopy and a hybrid ant colony : Tabu Search algorithm with polynomial bases expansion

It is widely accepted that feature selection is an essential step in predictive modeling. There are several approaches to feature selection, from filter techniques to meta-heuristics wrapper methods. In this paper, we propose a compilation of tools to optimize the fitting of black-box linear models. The proposed AnTSbe algorithm combines Ant Colony Optimization and Tabu Search memory list for the selection of features and uses l1 and l2 regularization norms to fit the linear models. In addition, a polynomial combination of input features was introduced to further explore the information contained in the original data. As a case study, excitation-emission matrix fluorescence data were used as the primary measurements to predict total sulfur concentration in diesel fuel samples. The sample dataset was divided into S10 (less than 10 ppm of total sulfur), and S100 (mean sulfur content of 100 ppm) groups and local linear models were fit with AnTSbe. For the Diesel S100 local models, using only 5 out of the original 1467 fluorescence pairs, combined with bases expansion, we were able to satisfactorily predict total sulfur content in samples with MAPE of less than 4% and RMSE of 4.68 ppm, for the test subset. For the Diesel S10 local models, the use of 4 Ex/Em pairs was sufficient to predict sulfur content with MAPE 0.24%, and RMSE of 0.015 ppm, for the test subset. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed methodology was able to satisfactorily optimize the fitting of linear models to predict sulfur content in diesel fuel samples without need of chemical of physical pre-treatment, and was superior to classic PLS regression methods and also to our previous results with ant colony optimization studies in the same dataset. The proposed AnTSbe can be directly applied to data from other sources without need for adaptations

Structural Relationships for National and Regional Production of Beef Calves

Notable changes have occurred in recent years that have produced basic changes in the beef industry. Structural relationships that existed for the producer-feeder are not necessarily significant in the operation of the cow-calf operator or the feed-lot operator. Structural economic models, which also can be used for forecasting, will be developed for the number of beef calves born in the United States and by specific homogeneous regions of production. The economic models will be tested for their ability to forecast the number of beef calves born during specific time periods. There has been a steady upward trend in both beef production and consumption from 1923 to 1963.The price of beef has risen relative to the general price level. The specific objectives of this study are: to determine the beef calf production in the United States by specific homogeneous geographical regions, to develop structural economic models for the number of beef calves born in the United States. The data will be taken from published reports by the United States Department of Agriculture. No accepted criteria were available for the breakdown of geographic areas for the production of beef calves. Therefore, the procedure was largely arbitrary

A simple equation for total reducing sugars (TRS) estimation on sweet potato and ethanol yield potential

Sweet potato is an attractive feedstock for ethanol production due to its high starch content and favorable agronomic characteristics. This paper proposes a simple equation to estimate the total reducing sugars (including glucose from starch) in sweet potatoes based on their moisture content (low cost and simple measurement). It allows the calculation of the ethanol production potential of a given sweet potato mash. According to the equation, the ethanol potential increases non-linearly with increasing concentrations of sweet potato mash in the fermenting medium (w/v), reaching a constant value for high concentrations (22 % of ethanol to 10 kg: L of a sweet potato with a moisture content of 66 %). Additionally, the ethanol yield potential is very sensitive to the sweet potato moisture, increasing linearly when the moisture decreases. We emphasize that the relations proposed in this paper can be used by other researchers, who can apply them to their specific cases

Economic evaluation of sweet potato distilled beverage produced by alternative route

Shochu is the most consumed distilled beverage in Japan, produced from sweet potato, one of the most cultivated vegetables in Brazil. Tchêchu is a similar distillate, produced by an innovative process, whose economic viability is the object of study of this work. The cost of producing a bottle (750 mL) of Tchêchu was estimated at US$2.56. The economic evaluation was based on economic indicators that resulted in positive net present value (US$ 530,501.42), internal rate of return (26% p.y.) higher than the minimum acceptable rate of return (9.25% p.y.) and payback of 2.44 years, indicating that the implantation of the distillery is economically viable

IT-based Fraud Management Approaches in Small and Medium Enterprises – A Multivocal Literature Review

Fraud, particularly cybercrime, is an emerging worldwide risk. Despite this, the risk of fraud appears underestimated in discussions of fraud mitigation and risk management in the context of SMEs. This multivocal literature review discusses ways of minimizing fraud for SMEs and IT-supported concepts that are currently proposed in literature. The present review shows that existing concepts often focus on specific or internal fraud risks and organizational countermeasures, but rarely cover newer fraud risks or suggest IT-supported measures to reduce the risk of fraud for SMEs. However, some IT security approaches have been proposed to mitigate fraud, but the area of internal control concepts of compliance and governance appears unconnected to IS approaches. This review identifies a lack of integrated fraud-management concepts, which is surprising due to the omnipresence of ICT, it found limitations in existing concepts and suggests areas for future IS research and academic discussion

Study of rice husk continuous torrefaction as a pretreatment for fast pyrolysis

Rice husk (RH) is one of the most available biomasses in southern Brazil. One possible solution is to carry out the fast pyrolysis of RH. To improve the quality of liquid products biomass can be torrefied before being pyrolyzed. The influence of torrefaction on the physical and chemical properties of pyrolysis products was explored. Both torrefaction and pyrolysis reactions were performed in a fluidized bed reactor in a continuous mode. Sample with torrefaction and pyrolysis at 500 ◦C presented the highest biochar yield (44.2 wt.%). The torrefaction step produced a lower yield of bio-oil. In contrast, the highest bio-oil yield (43.6 wt.%) was achieved in the sample without torrefaction at 500 ◦C. The increase in temperature to 750 ◦C provided a specific area of 16.7 m2 /kg for biochar. The highest value of HHV for bio-oil, 28 MJ/kg, was obtained via direct pyrolysis at 750 ◦C, which also led to the lowest water content of 5.9 wt%. According to the NMR analysis, the torrefaction liquid (TL) presented a high quantity of water and alcohols in its composition (92.5 %)