BACKGROUND Bluetongue (BT) is a vector-borne disease of ruminants caused by bluetongue virus that is transmitted by biting midges (Culicoides spp.). In 2006, the introduction of BTV serotype 8 (BTV-8) caused a severe epidemic in Western and Central Europe. The principal effective veterinary measure in response to BT was believed to be vaccination accompanied by other measures such as movement r...

The cost of milk production by farm size was decomposed into frontier and efficiency components with a stochastic cost curve using data on 755 USA dairy farms from the year 2000. The estimated frontier function is much flatter than the composite cost curve, and although the frontier cost of production decreases with farm size, that cost reduction is not as pronounced as a cost curve that includ...

background : since milk is considered as one of the most common foods in human life, this research aimed to evaluate the quality of milk produced in traditional and industrial dairy farms of yazd province in 2007.   materials and methods : in this descriptive study, six farms were selected in the cities sadoogh, yazd and mehriz and sampling was performed in each of them bimonthly throughout one...

Smallholding in the cocoa sector has been seen as a hindrance to production and productivity growth due to the ageing of the cocoa farmers, limited access to credit, low level of education and low adoptability of innovations. In order to curb this, policy makers have resorted to implementing policy instruments that encourage the extension of small rural farms into larger farms, thereby undermin...

The aim of this paper was to explore if, and in that case how, various preventive measures against mastitis influenced the whole-farm economic outcome, measured as technical efficiency, of a sample of specialised dairy farms in Sweden. In particular, the paper aimed at analysing whether a change to preventive measures applied by fully efficient farms would be a way for inefficient farms to beco...

Endemic diseases of cattle, such as bovine viral diarrhea, have significant impact on production efficiency of food of animal origin with consequences for animal welfare and climate change reduction targets. Many modeling studies focus on the local scale, examining the on-farm dynamics of this infectious disease. However, insight into prevalence and control across a network of farms ultimately ...

With the ever-increasing size of software and hardware components and the complexity of configurations, large-scale analytics systems face the challenge of frequent transient faults and permanent failures. As an indispensable part of big data analytics, MapReduce is equipped with a speculation mechanism to cope with run-time stragglers and failures. However, we reveal that the existing speculat...

Managing the mineral nutrition of free-range grazing livestock can be challenging. On farms where grazing animals are infrequently yarded, there are limited opportunities to administer trace element supplements via feeds and concentrates. In New Zealand, where the majority of sheep, cattle, and deer graze pasture year round, inadequate intake of cobalt, copper, iodine and selenium is prevalent....

As the share of wind energy increases on the global energy market, the efficient operation of wind farms gains an ever growing significance. Among operational decisions, the planning and scheduling of maintenance operations are crucial for the availability of turbines, as well as for the operational costs. The paper introduces a system that performs the detailed scheduling of maintenance operat...

Opportunities to make sequential decisions and adjust activities as a season progresses and more information becomes available characterise the farm management process. In this paper, we present a discrete stochastic two-stage utility efficient programming model of organic dairy farms, which includes risk aversion in the decision maker’s objective function as well as both embedded risk (stochas...