http://hdl.handle.net/1957/14948 Sun, 19 May 2013 11:01:32 GMT 2013-05-19T11:01:32Z http://hdl.handle.net/1957/38213 From Convenience to Commitment: Securing the Long-Term Viability of Local Meat and Poultry Processing Gwin, Lauren; Thiboumery, Arion Consumer demand for local food, including local meat and poultry, has risen in recent years. Meat and poultry processors are essential links in local meat supply chains. To sell meat, farmers need access to appropriately scaled processing facilities with the skills, inspection status, and other attributes to prepare these products safely, legally, and to customer specifications. Farmers and others suggest that limited processing infrastructure restricts the supply of local meat and poultry. At the same time, existing small processors often lack the steady, consistent business required for profitability. We analyze this multifaceted problem and identify fundamental causes, drawing on a cost analysis of local processing at three scales. We use case studies of seven successful local and regional processors to illustrate strategies and solutions that may be adopted by others. We conclude that business commitments between processors and farmers are critical to mutual success: farmers commit to providing consistent throughput of livestock to process, and processors commit to providing consistent, high-quality processing services. This commitment, supported by coordination and communication between processors and their customers as well as along the entire supply chain, is essential to the persistence and expansion of local meats. We also describe five collaborative efforts around the country involving public and private sector partners who aim to expand opportunities for local meat marketing by providing support and technical assistance to meat processors and their farmer customers. Sat, 01 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1957/38213 2013-06-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1957/38081 Malaria and Economic Development Datta, Saurabh C.; Reimer, Jeffrey J. Malaria tends to have a negative correlation with national income per capita. Many existing studies emphasize how falling rates of malaria can enhance economic development due to the beneficial effect on human capital. This paper emphasizes that causality may also run in the opposite direction, in particular, that higher incomes—arising for reasons having nothing to do with human capital—may allow for increased prevention and treatment of malaria, and therefore contribute to the negative correlation. We analyze the malaria-income relationship for 100 endemic countries over a 17-year period using a simultaneous equations model that accounts for reverse causality and incidental associations. For most countries, income growth has been the most important driver of the negative correlation between malaria and income. Although reducing malaria may be its own reward, it takes much more than reductions in malaria to foster development. This holds widely for different samples of countries. This is the publisher’s final pdf. The published article is copyrighted by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and can be found at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/%28ISSN%291467-9361. To the best of our knowledge, one or more authors of this paper were federal employees when contributing to this work. Fri, 01 Feb 2013 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1957/38081 2013-02-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1957/38030 The Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP): Protocols and pilot studies Rosenzweig, C.; Jones, J.W.; Hatfield, J.L.; Ruane, A.C.; Boote, K.J.; Thorburn, P.; Antle, J. M.; Nelson, G.C.; Porter, C.; Janssen, S.; Asseng, S.; Basso, B.; Ewert, F.; Wallach, D.; Baigorria, G.; Winter, J.M. The Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP) is a major international effort linking the climate, crop, and economic modeling communities with cutting-edge information technology to produce improved crop and economic models and the next generation of climate impact projections for the agricultural sector. The goals of AgMIP are to improve substantially the characterization of world food security due to climate change and to enhance adaptation capacity in both developing and developed countries. Analyses of the agricultural impacts of climate variability and change require a transdisciplinary effort to consistently link state-of-the-art climate scenarios to crop and economic models. Crop model outputs are aggregated as inputs to regional and global economic models to determine regional vulnerabilities, changes in comparative advantage, price effects, and potential adaptation strategies in the agricultural sector. Climate, Crop Modeling, Economics, and Information Technology Team Protocols are presented to guide coordinated climate, crop modeling, economics, and information technology research activities around the world, along with AgMIP Cross-Cutting Themes that address uncertainty, aggregation and scaling, and the development of Representative Agricultural Pathways (RAPs) to enable testing of climate change adaptations in the context of other regional and global trends. The organization of research activities by geographic region and specific crops is described, along with project milestones. Pilot results demonstrate AgMIP’s role in assessing climate impacts with explicit representation of uncertainties in climate scenarios and simulations using crop and economic models. An intercomparison of wheat model simulations near Obregón, Mexico reveals inter-model differences in yield sensitivity to [CO₂] with model uncertainty holding approximately steady as concentrations rise, while uncertainty related to choice of crop model increases with rising temperatures. Wheat model simulations with midcentury climate scenarios project a slight decline in absolute yields that is more sensitive to selection of crop model than to global climate model, emissions scenario, or climate scenario downscaling method. A comparison of regional and national-scale economic simulations finds a large sensitivity of projected yield changes to the simulations’ resolved scales. Finally, a global economic model intercomparison example demonstrates that improvements in the understanding of agriculture futures arise from integration of the range of uncertainty in crop, climate, and economic modeling results in multi-model assessments. © 2012 Published by Elsevier B.V. To the best of our knowledge, one or more authors of this paper were federal employees when contributing to this work. This is the publisher’s final pdf. The published article is copyrighted by Elsevier and can be found at: http://www.elsevier.com/. Fri, 15 Mar 2013 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1957/38030 2013-03-15T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1957/37917 Current and Future Land Use around a Nationwide Protected Area Network Hamilton, Christopher M.; Martinuzzi, Sebastian; Plantinga, Andrew J.; Radeloff, Volker C.; Lewis, David J.; Thogmartin, Wayne E.; Heglund, Patricia J.; Pidgeon, Anna M. Land-use change around protected areas can reduce their effective size and limit their ability to conserve biodiversity because land-use change alters ecological processes and the ability of organisms to move freely among protected areas. The goal of our analysis was to inform conservation planning efforts for a nationwide network of protected lands by predicting future land use change. We evaluated the relative effect of three economic policy scenarios on land use surrounding the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Wildlife Refuges. We predicted changes for three land-use classes (forest/range, crop/pasture, and urban) by 2051. Our results showed an increase in forest/range lands (by 1.9% to 4.7% depending on the scenario), a decrease in crop/pasture between 15.2% and 23.1%, and a substantial increase in urban land use between 28.5% and 57.0%. The magnitude of land-use change differed strongly among different USFWS administrative regions, with the most change in the Upper Midwestern US (approximately 30%), and the Southeastern and Northeastern US (25%), and the rest of the U.S. between 15 and 20%. Among our scenarios, changes in land use were similar, with the exception of our ‘‘restricted-urban-growth’’ scenario, which resulted in noticeably different rates of change. This demonstrates that it will likely be difficult to influence land-use change patterns with national policies and that understanding regional land-use dynamics is critical for effective management and planning of protected lands throughout the U.S. To the best of our knowledge, one or more authors of this paper were federal employees when contributing to this work. This is the publisher’s final pdf. The published article is copyrighted by Public Library of Science and can be found at: http://www.plos.org/. Thu, 31 Jan 2013 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1957/37917 2013-01-31T00:00:00Z