Northeast Iowa local food survey summary report

Institutional buyers in northeast Iowa were questioned about local food attributes and purchases

Cost Analysis of Potential North Dakota Subterminal Systems

The purpose of this study was to analyze the cost structures associated with subterminal facilities. An economic-engineering approach was used to determine the construction and operation costs of four different sizes of subterminal facilities operating at three different plant capacities. Profitability of subterminals was determined mainly by the volume of grain handled. If a subterminal marketed enough grain, it was able to incur both decreasing average fixed and average variable costs. The larger subterminals were found to be more profitable than the smaller facilities indicating the existence of economies of size in both the fixed and variable cost components. Profitability can be dramatically increased given the availability of internal financing for the construction cost and nondepreciable fixed costs. Upper Great Plains Transportation Institute Report No.44Marketing, Agribusiness,

Parallelization of irregularly coupled regular meshes

Regular meshes are frequently used for modeling physical phenomena on both serial and parallel computers. One advantage of regular meshes is that efficient discretization schemes can be implemented in a straight forward manner. However, geometrically-complex objects, such as aircraft, cannot be easily described using a single regular mesh. Multiple interacting regular meshes are frequently used to describe complex geometries. Each mesh models a subregion of the physical domain. The meshes, or subdomains, can be processed in parallel, with periodic updates carried out to move information between the coupled meshes. In many cases, there are a relatively small number (one to a few dozen) subdomains, so that each subdomain may also be partitioned among several processors. We outline a composite run-time/compile-time approach for supporting these problems efficiently on distributed-memory machines. These methods are described in the context of a multiblock fluid dynamics problem developed at LaRC

Competencies for practitioners working in food systems

This report describes a recent project funded through USDA Agricultural Marketing Service (USDA AMS) to understand food systems practitioner’s needs in various environments, cultures, and focus areas, as well as curriculum that is currently available to support food systems work. This project took place in 2019 with a group of over 30 individuals across the nation with diverse background and understanding of food systems and the systemic issues they connect to. Between August 2019-December 2019, partners worked collectively to identify core competencies needed for practitioners working in food systems, created a set of learning objectives for each competency, and identified existing curricula around the nation that met the objectives described