Economic Analysis of Base Acre and Payment Yield Designations Under the 2002 U.S. Farm Act

The 2002 Farm Act provided farmland owners the opportunity to update commodity program base acres and payment yields used for calculating selected program benefits. Findings in this report suggest that farmland owners responded to economic incentives in these decisions, selecting those options for designating base acres that resulted in the greatest expected flow of program payments. Decisions of farmland owners in South Dakota, in upland cotton area, and in the Heartland region support the payment-maximization argument. In general, landowners favored maximizing payments over aligning base acres to current or recent plantings. Farmland owners with high-payment base acres, such as rice and cotton, held on to these base acres and, whenever possible, expanded them. Analogously, landowners with low-payment commodity base acres, such as oats and barley, switched to higher payment commodities whenever possible.base, 2002 Farm Act, direct payments, counter-cyclical payments, production flexibility contract payments, base acres, program yields, Agricultural and Food Policy, Farm Management,

Hepatic fatty acid and glucose handling in metabolic disease: potential impact on cardiovascular disease risk

The prevalence of metabolic diseases, including type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) and metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD) is increasing. Although invariably associated with obesity, the importance of fat deposition in non-adipose tissue organs has yet to be fully explored. Pathological ectopic fat deposition within the liver (known as (MASLD)) has been suggested to underlie the development of T2DM and is now emerging as an independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease (CVD). The process of hepatic de novo lipogenesis (DNL), that is the synthesis of fatty acids from non-lipid precursors (e.g. glucose), has received much attention as it sits at the intersect of hepatic glucose and fatty acid handling. An upregulation of the DNL pathway has been suggested to be central in the development of metabolic diseases (including MASLD, insulin resistance, and T2DM). Here we review the evidence to determine if hepatic DNL may play a role in the development of MASLD and T2DM and therefore underlie an increased risk of CVD

Optimal L\'{e}vy-flight foraging in a finite landscape

We present a simple model to study L\'{e}vy-flight foraging in a finite landscape with countable targets. In our approach, foraging is a step-based exploratory random search process with a power-law step-size distribution $P(l) \propto l^{-\mu}$. We find that, when the termination is regulated by a finite number of steps $N$, the optimum value of $\mu$ that maximises the foraging efficiency can vary substantially in the interval $\mu \in (1,3)$, depending on the landscape features (landscape size and number of targets). We further demonstrate that subjective returning can be another significant factor that affects the foraging efficiency in such context. Our results suggest that L\'{e}vy-flight foraging may arise through an interaction between the environmental context and the termination of exploitation, and particularly that the number of steps can play an important role in this scenario which is overlooked by most previous work. Our study not only provides a new perspective on L\'{e}vy-flight foraging, but also opens new avenues for investigating the interaction between foraging dynamics and environment as well as offers a realistic framework for analysing animal movement patterns from empirical data.Comment: 25 pages, 6 figure

Inventory of Property owned by David B. Westcott

Inventory of property owned by David B. Westcotthttps://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/lantern-mcpc/1199/thumbnail.jp

Inventory of Enslaved Peopled owned by David B. Westcott

Inventory of enslaved people owned by David B. Westcotthttps://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/lantern-mcpc/1196/thumbnail.jp

Inventory of Property owned by David B. Westcott

Inventory of property owned by David B. Westcotthttps://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/lantern-mcpc/1197/thumbnail.jp

Inventory of Enslaved People owned by David B. Westcott

Inventory of enslaved people owned by David B. Westcotthttps://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/lantern-mcpc/1201/thumbnail.jp

Inventory of Property owned by David B. Westcott

Inventory of property owned by David B. Westcotthttps://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/lantern-mcpc/1198/thumbnail.jp

Inventory of Enslaved People owned by David B. Westcott

Inventory of enslaved people owned by David B. Westcotthttps://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/lantern-mcpc/1200/thumbnail.jp