Northeast Iowa Local Food Survey Summary Report

This is a preliminary report of findings from a survey of 140 institutional buyers in a five-county region in northeast Iowa for the Northeast Iowa Food and Farm Coalition. The survey found that 57 percent of respondents currently use locally grown food. This was a Leopold Center special project, RWG2007-01, related to the Regional Food Systems Working Group

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,

Let the vineyards be fruitful: A study of the potential market for Iowa grape juice

As grape production in Iowa increases, growers are looking for new markets. This study considers the buying potential for locally grown and processed grape juice

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

Economic analysis of current and potential Muscatine melon market

The Muscatine melon traditionally has been one of Iowa\u27s best known produce items. As the number of acres and producers decline, melon producers are looking for ways to make their product a more attractive economic production option, and place-based marketing may be helpful. Melon producers, however, need to ask themselves if they are willing to cooperatively develop and market a place-based product in order to achieve higher prices and profitability

Muscatine Melon: A Case Study of a Place-based Food in Iowa

This special project of the Leopold Center\u27s Marketing and Food Systems Initiative (2004-MSP09) looks at the 120-year history of melon production in southeast Iowa and potential for promotion

Impacts of the 1985 Food Security Act on Crop Rotations and Fertilizer Use

The 1985 Food Security Act has provided tremendous income support for U.S. farmers. This support has helped pull agriculture out of its worst depression in over 50 years. The financial incentives of the Food Security Act has assured substantial farmer participation. Data from a long-term rotation-fertility study conducted by Iowa State University was used to analyze the impact of the feedgrain program in the Food Security Act. The impacts analyzed were the rewards offered by the program as they relate to crop rotations and nitrogen fertilizer use. Average yields and costs from six alternative rotations and four nitrogen use levels were analyzed. Returns without a land charge were calculated with and without the government program