Synopsis: The Tractor Supply Company case introduces students to a unique retailing story. By recognizing a target market with unique needs, TSC repositioned its traditional tractorparts business into a specialty retailer serving a variety of needs for consumers entertaining their interests in part-time farming and ranching. This growing consumer segment has been TSC’s focus for the past 15 yea...

Avian TB is a contagious, chronic disease which affects a wide range of birds and mammals. All avian species are susceptible to infection to some degree, however the domestic chicken and sparrows are considered to be extremely susceptible. Despite having a worldwide distribution, Avian Tuberculosis amongst commercial poultry farmers has declined considerably over the years due to advances in bi...

Organic farming which experienced a constant rise over the last two decades is a system based on sustainability and on a concept tending towards functional integrity. Legislation as well as the wish to produce separately from conventional farming raise the question whether organic farming should be conducted completely apart from conventional farming or not. This paper discusses the aspects tha...

abstract. from the perspectives of many environmental and conservative policy makers, improving and diversifying the livelihoods have been found as a mechanism to promote the livelihoods and persuade people to avoid the overexploitation and degradation of natural resources. due to the fragility of the environment and inconsistency of incomes, the alternative income sources may be promised to wa...

It is a globally important challenge to meet increasing demands for resources and, at the same time, protect biodiversity and ecosystem services. Farming is usually regarded as a major threat to biodiversity due to its expansion into natural areas. We compared biodiversity of bees and wasps between heterogeneous small-scale farming areas and protected forest in northern coastal Belize, Central ...

The farming community, in many parts of Australia, is widely dispersed and heavily dependent upon communication both within the community and outside. In this preliminary paper we explore the information needs and information flows of the rural sector and consider the farm as the potential focus of a virtual community. A virtual community may form a basis both for electronic commerce, in the tr...

The productive capacity of soils is directly associated with their organic matter content which is the main reservoir of organic carbon and main source of nutrients for plants (Grandy et al., 2006; Studdert et al. 1997; Sisti et al., 2004; Urquiaga et al., 2004). A sustained increase in the concentration of organic carbon is needed to establish a land management system where the degradation of ...

The characteristic features of Japanese agriculture are rice production and its highly mechanized small scale farming system due to the limited land space. Agricultural production system in mechanization has been currently changed from mass production system to flexible manufacturing system, which became already much popular in industrial production one. This can be explained that the target cr...

Sustainability is de®ned as the ability of a system to `continue'. In view of this de®nition, several aspects of the crop protection activity in organic farming are reviewed according to their ability to `continue'. As no absolute measure of sustainability is available, this analysis takes the form of a comparison between organic and conventional crop protection methods. Two elements of crop pr...

During the last century, the changing forms of agriculture drastically influenced many native plant and animal populations. In the efforts to reduce these negative impacts on biodiversity, a number of agricultural enterprises began farming in a more environmentally friendly ways; in addition to conventional farm management, new forms of integrated and organic farming appeared, the latter having...