Louisiana sugar: a geohistorical perspective

The planting of sugarcane in Louisiana’s southern parishes has persisted with stunning continuity since its introduction in the late eighteenth century. This industry, however, is an economic and agricultural anomaly. It is a relic of the sixteenth-century expansion of European capitalism in which granulated sugar, then a novel product, stimulated the Atlantic slave trade and contributed to the incorporation of the sugar-producing colonies of the Americas into an emerging European-world economy. The Louisiana sugar industry was launched in 1795 with a historic granulation from a new variety of sugarcane recently introduced into the Caribbean. From this early success, the industry grew rapidly as immigrants from the Caribbean poured into Louisiana to escape the unrest associated with slave revolts and incipient emancipation. The burgeoning industry contributed to a westward migration of US populations into the newly opened Louisiana Territory as entrepreneurs responded to news of the enormous wealth made by the successful sugar planters. The sugar industry of Louisiana also stimulated the expansion of intra-regional slave trade as eastern slaveholders sold surplus slaves to the widening slave economy of the state, putting in place institutions and values that remain problematic today. Sugarcane now contributes the largest share of the state’s gross farm income, having surpassed cotton in year 2000. Its cultivation in the latitudes of Louisiana , however, is at a disadvantage compared to the tropical climates, where its full maturation is not abbreviated by a short growing season. The Louisiana industry persists in this marginal climate because of tariff protection, price supports, and the on-going research to select and release ever-stronger varieties with resilience, early maturation, and high sugar concentration. When viewed from the national and global perspectives, especially the eventualities of the NAFTA and trade resolutions with Cuba, continued sugarcane cultivation in Louisiana’s subtropical climate is an uncertainty

Stock assessment of protogynous fish: evaluating measures of spawning biomass used to estimate biological reference points

In stock assessments, recruitment is typically modeled as a function of females only. For protogynous stocks, however, disproportionate fishing on males increases the possibility of reduced fertilization rates. To incorporate the importance of males in protogynous stocks, assessment models have been used to predict recruitment not just from female spawning biomass (Sf), but also from that of males (Sm) or both sexes (Sb). We conducted a simulation study to evaluate the ability of these three measures to estimate biological reference points used in fishery management. Of the three, Sf provides best estimates if the potential for decreased fertilization is weak, whereas Sm is best only if the potential is very strong. In general, Sb estimates the true reference points most closely, which indicates that if the potential for decreased fertilization is moderate or unknown, Sb should be used in assessments of protogynous stocks. Moreover, for a broad range of scenarios, relative errors from Sf and Sb occur in opposite directions, indicating that estimates from these measures could be used to bound uncertainty

Relation of population size to marine growth and time of spawning migration in the pink salmon (Oncorhynchus gorbuscha) of southeastern Alaska

In studying the relation of an animal population to its environment it must always be remembered that the population forms part of its own environment. This is due mainly to the influence its size has upon the other elements, both physico-chemical and biotic, of the environment. Allee ( 1931) in his discussion of the harmful effects of crowding upon growth separates the growth retarding factors into two groups namely, the vague and the definite...

Private Agri-food Standards: Supply Chains and the Governance of Standards

The articles in this second special issue of the International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food on private agri-food standards consider key issues involved in the shift from government to governance within agri-food systems. The first special issue, published in February 2013, focused on ‘the contestation, hybridity and the politics of standards’ (Bain et al., 2013, p. 1). The articles in the first issue complicated our understanding of the relationship between public and private standards by examining the politics associated with their formation, implementation, and outcomes. At the same time, the first special issue drew attention to the diversity of private standards, and the spaces that exist – or get created – for actors to contest the values, content or outcomes of such standards. These are important themes, revisited in the second special issue. However, the concern with the politics of standards is extended through more systematic attention to the relationship between standards, certification, and the governance of agri-food supply chains

Private Agri-food Standards: Contestation, Hybridity and the Politics of Standards

Standards are an omnipresent yet generally taken-for-granted part of our everyday life (Higgins and Larner, 2010a; Timmermans and Epstein, 2010; Busch, 2011). Until recently, standards within the agri-food sector were typically dismissed (if thought of at all) by social scientists as rather benign, technical tools, primarily of interest to specialists concerned with facilitating markets and trade. Over the past decade, however, this assessment has changed considerably and many agri-food scholars now view standards as a useful entry point for analysing and understanding our social and material world. The degree of interest today is reflected in the fact that our call for papers on private agri-food standards attracted so many high-quality submissions that we are publishing this special issues in two parts. In part, this shift in interest reflects the influence of science studies and its concern with studying ‘mundane’ and taken-for-granted objects and practices (Higgins and Larner, 2010b). Here scholars take inanimate objects seriously, to understand, for example, how non-human actors such as standards allow humans to ‘act at a distance’ (Latour, 1987), thereby ordering relations across time and space. Many agri-food researchers are also concerned with the rise of private food standards developed by global retailers and non-government organizations, including understanding the role that these standards might play in coordinating and governing production and consumption relations within the context of globalization (Giovannucci and Ponte, 2005; Hatanaka et al., 2005; Mutersbaugh, 2005; Tallontire et al., 2011)

Looking Back in Order to Move Forward: Lessons from COVID-19 for Teacher Education

This article provides critical perspectives on education technology integration in a teacher education context in a post-pandemic world. The authors—two early career teachers, one in a pre-school and one in an elementary school, and two elementary teacher education faculty members at a mid-sized public university—use the U.S. Department of Education’s 2016 guiding principles for educational technology in teacher education for analysis. The commentary evolves directly from and reflects the authors’ collective experience across the P-20 spectrum in education technology, with close attention paid to what was learned during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent pivot to remote learning in spring 2020, which altered the teacher education landscape in significant ways. This article makes curricular and pedagogical suggestions for P-20 educators, and concludes with recommendations for future research at the intersection of technology integration and teacher education

Esterification Of Carboxylic Acids For Analysis Via Gas Chromatography Using Swellable Organically Modified Silica As A Nano-Reactor

Gas chromatography is a popular method for the identification and quantification of organic mixtures. Currently, there are no simple methods for the quantitative analysis of carboxylic acids via gas chromatography. This research proposes an efficient universal method for the derivatization of carboxylic acids to methyl esters in the presence of an acid catalyst by using swellable organically modified silica (SOMS) as a nano-reactor. SOMS forces the esterification reaction toward completion in two ways: 1) by forcing reagents to interact and 2) by removing the water byproduct from the reaction vessel to invoke Le Chatelier's principle. This work has shown that esterification reactions of simple carboxylic acids in SOMS produce quantitative yields, efficiently, without excessive heat or expensive catalysts, making it an ideal choice for the chromatographic analysis of carboxylic acids. The esterification of a representative library of simple carboxylic acids using SOMS, along with spectral data collected from proton nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and a proof of concept experiment using gas chromatography were utilized to validate the hypothesis set forth in this project. Through this endeavor, an experimental procedure was established that will set the groundwork for the eventual optimization and application of this esterification method to more complex molecules