ECONOMIC ANALYSIS APPROACHES TO POTATO-BASED INTEGRATED CROP SYSTEMS: ISSUES AND METHOD
In response to stagnating yields and mounting pest problems, Michigan potato growers are investigating ways to bring manure and cover crops back into potato production systems. The alternative systems bring benefits and costs for monetary net returns, the variability of net returns, and environmental impacts. This paper reviews the likely yield and biological system effects of alternative potato production systems that incorporate manure and cover crops. After briefly considering research designs for gathering experimental versus farm field data, it reviews four economic analysis methods for evaluating alternative systems. All methods are illustrated with examples. First, for evaluating comparative average profitability, it reviews a) enterprise budgets, b) partial budgets, and c) break-even analysis. Second, for integrating environmental impacts into profitability analysis by using monetary measures of environmental effects, it introduces "green" budgets. Third, for evaluating efficiency trade-offs between profitability and environmental impacts, it covers trade-off frontiers. Finally, for comparing the variability of returns across systems (including for risk-averse decision makers), it introduces analysis of variance and stochastic dominance. These methods provide a basic set of tools for the economic analysis of changes in potato-based crop systems that should be adequate for most static comparisons of annual crop management practices.
The Economics of Annual Legume and Double Legume Cover Cropping in Southern Minnesota
Using historical data from crop producing farms in southern Manitoba, this study quantifies the economic savings that could be realized by using legumes to supply nitrogen in a cereal-oilseed based rotation. Stochastic budgets are developed for four alternative crop rotations and the returns associated with each are evaluated using the utility-based risk ranking methods of stochastic dominance and stochastic efficiency. It is found that including a legume cover crop in a cereal-oilseed based rotation can reduce the amount of nitrogen required by a subsequent crop and in turn increase the net returns associated with the complete crop rotation.
Bodies Politic : Disease , Death and Doctors in Britain , 1650-1900
In spite of its intellectual, literary and comic brilliance, this book contains a dark and disturbing, but revealing, message. In some ways, my melancholy reading of Bodies Politic has inevitably been shaped by Roy's recent untimely death. Roy Porter was without doubt the finest social historian of medicine this country, or indeed the world, has produced. Expansive, humorous, intelligent, and incisive, his broad range of historical works has excited and educated several generations of students of history over the past thirty years. His death leaves an unfillable void within the global history of medicine. At the same time, however, this book itself, completed well before his death, is haunted by elements of despair and uncertainty that should make us carefully reconsider not only the purpose and direction of our professional inquiries but also our own mortality.