A spatial and temporal Monte-Carlo simulation model was developed to analyse the epidemiology and control of foot and mouth disease (FMD). Animal, people and vehicle contacts as well as airborne and local spread represented the FMD virus transmission between farms housing cattle, pigs or sheep. Contacts were explicitly modelled by routes, airborne transmission by the Gaussian Dispersion model a...

OBJECTIVES To describe all terrain vehicle (ATV) ownership, access, use, and safety behaviours in rural Manitoba children. METHODS Questionnaire administered to a convenience sample of grade 6 students attending an agricultural fair. RESULTS 162 grade 6 children participated. The mean age was 11.4 years, and 46% were male. 125 students (77%) reported having access to ATVs, including 69 four...

Background Agriculture is an industry where family members often live and work on the same premises. This study evaluated injury patterns and outcomes in children from farm-related accidents. Methods A 10-year retrospective review of farm-accident related injuries was conducted of patients 17 years and younger. Data collected included demographics, injury mechanism, accident details, injury s...

Poultry and poultry products are commonly considered as the major vehicle of Campylobacter infection in humans worldwide. To reduce the number of human cases, the epidemiology of Campylobacter in poultry must be better understood. Therefore, the objective of the present study was to determine the distribution and genetic relatedness of Campylobacter in the Thai chicken production industry. Duri...

in addition to increment of the vehicle sprung mass, the main physical effects of addition of cng tank to the vehicle are the longitudinal and height displacement of center of gravity, which have the most influences on the handling, braking, roll stability and spin stability of the vehicle. increment of cng tank mass to the sprung mass of the vehicle increases the vehicle under-steer gradient, ...

This study assesses the reported farm income crisis in Canada and uses farm financial data to illustrate the importance and impact that management skills and practices have on farm income and net worth. For grain and oilseed farms, large farms produce higher revenues per hectare and achieve economies of scale on operating expenses, interest and depreciation, making them significantly more profi...

The objective of the present study was to investigate optimal group size in cattle in communal pastures where cattle from various farms are turned out: (1) to ascertain if cows derived from each farm form an affiliative group and (2) to investigate the effect of the number of farm mates on social and maintenance behaviours when farm mates form an affiliative group. Farm mates were defined as co...

As the size of livestock farms in The Netherlands is on the increase for economic reasons, an important question is how disease introduction risks and risks of onward transmission scale with farm size (i.e. with the number of animals on the farm). Here we use the epidemic data of the 1997-1998 epidemic of Classical Swine Fever (CSF) Virus in The Netherlands to address this question for CSF risk...

The widespread use of Twitter makes it very interesting to determine the opinions and the sentiments expressed by its users. The shortness of the length and the highly informal nature of tweets render it very difficult to automatically detect such information. This paper reports the results to a challenge, set forth by SemEval-2013 Task 2, to determine the positive, neutral, or negative sentime...

Structural transformation is a process by which the relative contribution of nonagricultural sectors to the overall economy rises as agriculture’s share declines in relative terms. In absolute terms, however, agriculture continues to grow and contribute to overall economic growth. Agricultural productivity growth and increased farm incomes are prerequisites for structural transformation. Increa...