Sustainable Agriculture and Conservation Tillage: Managing the Contradictions*

L'auteur examine dans cet article l'élaboration d'un discours sur l'agriculture, qui encourage l'adoption d'un travail de conservation du sol comme agriculture écologiquement durable. L'analyse débute par l'argument selon lequel ce discours est né dans les années 1980, en réponse aux conséquences sur l'environnement de l'agriculture classique. On soutient ensuite que l'attention portée au travail du sol plutôt qu'à d'autres solutions de rechange quant à ces impacts, attention qui doit être comprise dans le cadre d'une analyse plus large des développements politico-économiques dans le domaine de l'agriculture au Canada. On a déterminé que les intérêsts contradic-toires des divers secteurs de l'industrie agroalimentaire, en ce qui concerne le maintien de l'utilisation de produits chimiques coûteux et le contrôle des prix payés aux agriculteurs dans le contexte de la crise économique de l'agriculture, jouaient un rôle essentiel dans l'attention portée au travail du sol. On soutient que le travail de conservation du sol permet de régler ces contradictions de deux façons. Tout d'abord, le travail de conservation du sol a fourni une base pour affirmer que les problèmes de pollution chimique et d'épuisement du sol étaient en train d'être résolus sans que soient nécessaires des changements plus substantiels dans le système de production à base chimique. Enfin, il offrait aux agriculteurs un moyen et une raison de réduire les coûts de production devant les crises constantes relatives aux prix et a la rentabilité des fermes. This paper examines the development of a discourse within agriculture which promotes the adoption of conservation tillage as environmentally sustainable farming. The analysis begins with the argument that the discourse emerged during the 1980s as a response to the environmental impacts of conventional agriculture. It is then argued that the focus on tillage practices over other alternative solutions to these impacts must be understood within a broader analysis of the political-economic developments in Canadian agriculture. The contradictory interests of the various sectors of agribusiness capital, both in sustaining the use of expensive chemical inputs and in controlling the prices paid to farmers within the context of the farm economic crisis, are identified as playing a vital role in shaping the focus on tillage practices. It is contended that conservation tillage offered a means of mediating these contradictions in two ways. First, conservation tillage provided a basis for the claim that chemical pollution and soil depletion problems were being resolved without the need for more substantial changes in the chemically-based production system and, second, it gave farmers a means and a rationale for cutting production costs in the face of continuing crises in prices and profitability at the farm gate level.     

The involvement of board of directors and institutional investors in investing in transition economies: An agency theory approach

We investigate the influence of the composition of the board of directors and stock ownership patterns on the decision to enter markets in Central and Eastern Europe. Our findings suggest that board composition alone does not influence the entry decision while firms with less concentrated stock ownership were more likely to enter these developing markets. We also found that while better performing firms were attracted to opportunities in Central and Eastern Europe, firms with poor prior performance and outside dominated boards were also more likely to enter these markets.     

A Comparison of Bayesian Models of Heteroscedasticity in Nested Normal Data

We consider the fitting of a Bayesian model to grouped data in which observations are assumed normally distributed around group means that are themselves normally distributed, and consider several alternatives for accommodating the possibility of heteroscedasticity within the data. We consider the case where the underlying distribution of the variances is unknown, and investigate several candidate prior distributions for those variances. In each case, the parameters of the candidate priors (the hyperparameters) are themselves given uninformative priors (hyperpriors). The most mathematically convenient model for the group variances is to assign them inverse gamma distributed priors, the inverse gamma distribution being the conjugate prior distribution for the unknown variance of a normal population. We demonstrate that for a wide class of underlying distributions of the group variances, a model that assigns the variances an inverse gamma-distributed prior displays favorable goodness-of-fit properties relative to other candidate priors, and hence may be used as standard for modeling such data. This allows us to take advantage of the elegant mathematical property of prior conjugacy in a wide variety of contexts without compromising model fitness. We test our findings on nine real world publicly available datasets from different domains, and on a wide range of artificially generated datasets.     

Influence diagnostic analysis in the possibly heteroskedastic linear model with exact restrictions

The local influence method has proven to be a useful and powerful tool for detecting influential observations on the estimation of model parameters. This method has been widely applied in different studies related to econometric and statistical modelling. We propose a methodology based on the Lagrange multiplier method with a linear penalty function to assess local influence in the possibly heteroskedastic linear regression model with exact restrictions. The restricted maximum likelihood estimators and information matrices are presented for the postulated model. Several perturbation schemes for the local influence method are investigated to identify potentially influential observations. Three real-world examples are included to illustrate and validate our methodology.     

Decision-making processes in community transport organisations: a comparative case study of service providers

Transport services provided by voluntary organisations have grown dramatically in recent years. However, little systematic research has been undertaken on the functioning of these organisations. The aim of the research on which this paper is based was to rectify the lack of information on how decisions relating to service provision are made by such organisations — often called community transport (CT) operators. Three organisations were selected for a comparative case study approach. The results show that the leadership approach of their key staff was of particular significance. Each organisation is moving in the direction of greater professionalism and away from its community roots. This cultural change can be attributed to responses to external forces, especially those affecting resources. Evidence suggests they are being forced towards adopting practices of the private sector, but that this need not be the case. Community transport provision is in a period of transition, the outcome of which may radically alter both its structure and its survival capacities.The research on which this paper is based was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. The authors would also like to place on record their thanks to the three organisations who participated in this study.     

Using satellite remote sensing and household survey data to assess human health and nutrition response to environmental change

Climate change and degradation of ecosystem services functioning may threaten the ability of current agricultural systems to keep up with demand for adequate and inexpensive food and for clean water, waste disposal and other broader ecosystem services. Human health is likely to be affected by changes occurring across multiple geographic and time scales. Impacts range from increasing transmissibility and the range of vectorborne diseases, such as malaria and yellow fever, to undermining nutrition through deleterious impacts on food production and concomitant increases in food prices. This paper uses case studies to describe methods that make use of satellite remote sensing and Demographic and Health Survey data to better understand individual-level human health and nutrition outcomes. By bringing these diverse datasets together, the connection between environmental change and human health outcomes can be described through new research and analysis.     

Does the Census Miss the Native-Born Children of Immigrant Mothers? Evidence from State-Level Undercount by Race and Hispanic Status

Population Research and Policy Review - Despite research going back over a century showing the U.S. census counts some groups more accurately than others at the national level, little is known...     

The United States should recognize and support caregiving youth

In the United States, more than 5.4 million children and adolescents under age 18 provide care for family members who are aging or have chronic illness, disability, or other health conditions that require assistance. In this policy report, we describe youth’s care for the family, and highlight the increasing prevalence, global challenges, and uneven successes of measurement and categorization. We briefly summarize research on how caregiving affects youth’s academic, social, and emotional well-being. Next, we present novel, emerging evidence from the public school-based 2019 Youth Risk Behavior Survey for the State of Florida, which suggests that as many as 24% of middle school students and 16% of high school students provide at least some care to the family on a regular basis. Drawing on this evidence, we discuss targeted social programs which have been shown to promote the well-being of caregiving youth outside of the United States, as well as a 13-year-old school-based intervention in The School District of Palm Beach County, Florida. We conclude with specific recommendations for a path toward recognizing and supporting caregiving youth via policy and practice in the United States. Our aim is to increase the awareness and feasibility of identifying and supporting caregiving youth and their families via government-organized data collection and targeted social policies.