Chemical Problems of Farm Water Supplies

The water supply on South Dakota farms is a source of many problems. In most cases, it is a difficult and expensive operation to obtain an adequate supply at a desirable location. Once obtained, many problems of plumbing and maintenance are left to be solved. Although the installation and maintenance may be expensive and difficult, the question of water quality may be even more important. The chemical quality of the ground waters (wells and springs) of the state in variable. In a few instances, well waters containing very low concentrations of dissolved materials have been found, but most have fairly high to excessively high amounts of dissolved minerals (salts). Depending upon the use to which the water is put, these salts may or may not be objectionable. Will and springs, of course, are not the only sources of waters on our farms and ranches. Stock dams are widely used in many parts of the state, and the water in these does not often present problems of a chemical nature as long as it is used only for livestock. Cisterns are occasionally employed to store rain water collected from the roofs of buildings, and most of the troubles with this type of supply concern contamination with ground waters, bacterial contamination, excessive color, or bad odors. Streams, lakes, or rivers are also used, and here as in the case of ground water supplies the chemical quality is highly variable. (See more in text

Wintering Calves with Alfalfa Hay or Prairie Hay

Alfalfa hay has been recognized for many years as being a high-quality roughage for cattle. However, some cattle feeders in the state prefer prairie hay over alfalfa hay. The experiment reported here was designed to compare the performance of calves wintered on (1) alfalfa hay alone, (2) a mixture of alfalfa hay and prairie hay, (3) prairie hay and soybean meal pellets, and (4) prairie hay alone. In addition to these companions, some studies were made on the effect of winter gains on summer performance of the calves when grazing native prairie pasture

Soft Corn - Feeding and Handling

In an attempt to cover problems of major concern to farmers, soft corn research was outlined by the Experiment station as follows: 1. Suitable temporary storage 2. The type of crib suitable for drying soft corn under South Dakota conditions 3. Effective methods of drying 4. The extent of mold growth and its effect on the corn 5. The chemical changes that take place in the soft corn when stored 6. Its feeding value for livestock and poultry as compared with hard corn 7. The relative ability of calves, yearlings, lambs and pigs to utilize soft corn 8. Satisfactory methods of feeding soft cor

A flexible and low-cost open-source IPMC mezzanine for ATCA boards based on OpenIPMC

This work presents the development of an Intelligent Platform Management Controller mezzanine in a Mini DIMM form factor for use in electronic boards compliant to the PICMG Advanced Telecommunication Computing Architecture (ATCA) standard. The module is based on an STMicroelectronics STM32H745 microcontroller running the OpenIPMC open-source software. The mezzanine has been successfully tested on a variety of ATCA boards being proposed for the upgrade of the experiments at the HL-LHC, with its design and firmware being distributed under open-source hardware license

Study of nuclear recoils in liquid argon with monoenergetic neutrons

For the development of liquid argon dark matter detectors we assembled a setup in the laboratory to scatter neutrons on a small liquid argon target. The neutrons are produced mono-energetically (E_kin=2.45 MeV) by nuclear fusion in a deuterium plasma and are collimated onto a 3" liquid argon cell operating in single-phase mode (zero electric field). Organic liquid scintillators are used to tag scattered neutrons and to provide a time-of-flight measurement. The setup is designed to study light pulse shapes and scintillation yields from nuclear and electronic recoils as well as from {\alpha}-particles at working points relevant to dark matter searches. Liquid argon offers the possibility to scrutinise scintillation yields in noble liquids with respect to the populations of the two fundamental excimer states. Here we present experimental methods and first results from recent data towards such studies.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures, proceedings of TAUP 2011, to be published in Journal of Physics: Conference Series (JCPS

Grass Hay at its Best

With an ever increasing demand for food and the need for greater efficiency of production, it is important that the nutrients available in grass be conserved and utilized to the greatest possible extent. To accomplish this it is necessary that stockmen be provided with more complete and accurate information pertaining to the nutritive value of hay from this area. That is the purpose of this bulletin, based on investigations that have been conducted during the past eight years by the South Dakota Agricultural Experiment Station

Ground and Rolled Corn Grain in Beef Cattle Rations

In three feeding trials with beef cattle, comparisons between ground and rolled corn grain were made along with other tests on various types of rations. Results obtained with ground and rolled corn are reported in this publication. Corn was fed with 50% ground alfalfa hay in one trial and with 20% ground alfalfa hay in two other trials. Digestion trials were conducted in conjunction with two of the feeding trials

Improving Photoelectron Counting and Particle Identification in Scintillation Detectors with Bayesian Techniques

Many current and future dark matter and neutrino detectors are designed to measure scintillation light with a large array of photomultiplier tubes (PMTs). The energy resolution and particle identification capabilities of these detectors depend in part on the ability to accurately identify individual photoelectrons in PMT waveforms despite large variability in pulse amplitudes and pulse pileup. We describe a Bayesian technique that can identify the times of individual photoelectrons in a sampled PMT waveform without deconvolution, even when pileup is present. To demonstrate the technique, we apply it to the general problem of particle identification in single-phase liquid argon dark matter detectors. Using the output of the Bayesian photoelectron counting algorithm described in this paper, we construct several test statistics for rejection of backgrounds for dark matter searches in argon. Compared to simpler methods based on either observed charge or peak finding, the photoelectron counting technique improves both energy resolution and particle identification of low energy events in calibration data from the DEAP-1 detector and simulation of the larger MiniCLEAN dark matter detector.Comment: 16 pages, 16 figure

First results on light readout from the 1-ton ArDM liquid argon detector for dark matter searches

ArDM-1t is the prototype for a next generation WIMP detector measuring both the scintillation light and the ionization charge from nuclear recoils in a 1-ton liquid argon target. The goal is to reach a minimum recoil energy of 30\,keVr to detect recoiling nuclei. In this paper we describe the experimental concept and present results on the light detection system, tested for the first time in ArDM on the surface at CERN. With a preliminary and incomplete set of PMTs, the light yield at zero electric field is found to be between 0.3-0.5 phe/keVee depending on the position within the detector volume, confirming our expectations based on smaller detector setups.Comment: 14 pages, 10 figures, v2 accepted for publication in JINS