Many farmers in the developing world have limited access to agricultural technologies and markets. Mobile phone-enabled services that offer price information and market linkages could contribute towards bridging this gap by reducing uncertainty about expected profits, information asymmetries and market inefficiencies. This article uses the example of the price information and marketing service ...

The extraction of wave energy by the Wave Energy Converters (WECs) forming a wave farm results in a milder wave climate in its lee, which can have an impact on coastal processes. The objective of this work is to determine whether the beach morphology can be altered by the operation of the wave farm, and if so, to quantify this alteration. For this purpose, we examine how the farm affects the mo...

The study examines the technical efficiency of poultry egg production in Ogun state using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and OLS regression. The data for the study were collected with the use of wellstructured questionnaires from poultry farmers. Average number of birds for small farm size is 301, for medium farm size is 740, while that of large size is 2288. The corresponding net returns were...

This paper presents a scalable digital learning system that can store and provide Web access to digital contents from voluntaries, teachers, and institutions that lack resources or expertise to offer classes over the Internet. We use the server-cluster architecture as a way to create scalable and highly available solutions. However, hosting a variety of contents from different owners on such a ...

Foot-and-mouth disease is one of the most contagious diseases of animal livestock. We used statistical tools to explore the dynamics of epidemics and to evaluate the consequences of virus reintroduction in France. We developed a stochastic farm-based model adapted to the French farm structure from previous modeling works following the 2001 epidemic in the United Kingdom. This model depends upon...

A farmer’s choice to make an on-farm investment programme can be modelled as a discrete choice amongst finite alternatives. The idea of this paper is to test the possibility of using discrete choice models in the field of the evaluation of structural policies. Farmers choose to take part into agricultural programmes according to their preferences, and farm structural and economic characteristic...

Since 2007, a national Salmonella control program including obligatory vaccination has been ongoing in Belgium. In this context, the aim of the present study was to investigate the diversity of Salmonella enterica serovar Enteritidis isolates on 5 persistently contaminated Belgian layer farms and to examine the potential sources and transmission routes of Salmonella Enteritidis contamination on...

This report outlines the results of various experiments to model the probability of an area-frame farm not being on the census mailing list (NML) using covariates such as total sales, type of farm, acreage, various operator characteristics (gender, Hispanic status, race, and whether the primaryl occupation of the principal operator is farming), number (if any) of equine on the farm, and, option...

Anti-wind farm activists repeatedly claim that families said to be adversely affected by noise from wind turbines "abandon" their homes. In Australia, a claim of "more than 40 families" has been made by a prominent anti-wind farm activist. Six sources (parliamentary submissions, media reports, an anti-wind farm website, wind industry sources, correspondence with known anti-wind farm activists a...