1,720,985 research outputs found
Expanding Food Bank Impact: Healthy Food and Sustainable Farm Production
No full textThe Greater Lansing Food Bank (GLFB) is a food bank in mid-Michigan that is rethinking its mission and service to the community. Rather than simply supply as much food as possible, it is instituting programs that help its clients to help themselves by alleviating poverty. GLFB has a 30-year-old community garden program that provides support to about 100 community gardens and 450 low-income home gardens, ultimately helping around 7,000 individuals access food through gardening each year. In Fall 2012, the GLFB launched Lansing Roots, a farm business development opportunity that minimizes the barriers to starting a farm business. This program provides its participants with access to fresh foods, a supplemental source of income, and critical community building opportunities. Many refugee communities with farming backgrounds reside in the Lansing area, and benefit from the incubator farm program’s resources, including tools, technical training, affordable land, and cooperative marketing opportunities.
The purpose of this master’s research project is to evaluate the effectiveness and feasibility of this incubator-food bank relationship. Other food banks in the Feeding America network have reached out to GLFB for advice on implementing similar programs. However, this is a unique pairing of entities with little precedence in the literature; typically farm incubators are independent organizations and rarely, if ever, are food banks in the role of organizer. This project therefore includes: 1) benchmarking of best practices for food banks using a literature review and survey; 2) benchmarking of best practices for farm incubators through a literature review, survey, interviews, and GIS; 3) the creation of best practices for integrated food bank-incubator relationships; and 4) a glossy toolkit that GLFB can share with other Feeding America member food banks to guide implementation of similar programs. In short, this research helps to determine how incubators can be successful, as well as whether food banks are adequately positioned to be stewards of such farm-based programs. Identifying a method for food banks to help their clients feed themselves would have profound impacts on communities that are food insecure.Master of Science (MS)Natural Resources and EnvironmentUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/110999/1/Food_Bank_2015.pd
Case Study #8-1 of the Program: ''Food Policy For Developing Countries: The Role Of Government In The Global Food System''
Get PDF12 pp.©Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. All rights reserved. This case study may be reproduced for educational purposes without express permission but must include acknowledgment to Cornell University. No commercial use is permitted without permission.Soil degradation, a process that reduces the potential of land to support animal and plant production, has become one of the most pressing problems for farmers worldwide (Scherr 1999). Based on the opinions of 250 international experts, the United Nations Global Land Assessment of Degradation concluded as early as 1992 that degradation had caused a 38 percent loss in global agricultural land since the 1940s (Oldeman et al. 1992). This soil loss, at a rate of 5 to 10 million hectares per year, has multiple causes, including nutrient and vegetative depletion, agrochemical pollution, deforestation, and soil erosion due to severe floods, wind, and steep hillside farming (Scherr and Yadav 1996). Despite dire forecasts, Dregne and Chou (1992) estimated that reduced soil quality would not threaten the balance of international food supply in the near decades. What warrants close scrutiny, however, is the regional impact of these changes, particularly in hot spots where degradation may be reversible only through costly on-farm investments or engineering strategies, if at all (Scherr and Yadav 1996). Drylands alone are 70 percent degraded, affecting nearly 2 billion people (FAO 2002). Regionally, Latin America has the highest proportion of degraded agricultural land in the world, followed by Africa (Scherr and Yadav 1996). Peru's north coast, the focus of this case study, is threatened most by salinization, a process that can cause irreversible desert-like conditions (UNEP 1992). With salinization now affecting up to 40 percent of cropland on the north coast (Collado 2001), the situation could have national repercussions. Although the coastal valleys make up only 3.8 percent of Peruvian agricultural land, including pasture and forest, they yield 50 percent of Peru's gross agricultural product (Vera 2006). Despite a history of intensive agriculture on the north coast that extends back to 200 C.E. (Nordt et al. 2004), it appears that recent changes—irrigation practices, rice-focused production, and limited opportunities to invest in or build the capacity for soil conservation— have exacerbated the susceptibility of soil in the region to salinization. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), World Bank, and United Nations all agree that soil conditions may improve most through community initiatives that increase productivity sustainably while improving the economies of poor households dependent on agriculture (Dixon et al. 2001; UNCCD 2005). One program implemented in the Peruvian coastal department of Piura by the nongovernmental organization (NGO) Heifer Project International (HPI) appears to have had success. HPI's key strategies focused on participatory planning and management with leaders of local irrigation commissions, training in eco-agriculture practices, and rotating funds for small-scale livestock and seeds for alternative crops. After three years, the project expanded from 20 households to 689, and farmers reported reduced salinization, lower input costs, and increased production and income. Despite HPI's apparent success, some development theorists question whether local impacts like this can last or how valuable they are to broader systems without scaling up. Considering the wider policy environment presented here, your assignment is to determine the next steps you would take if you were directing HPI in Peru. Who would you target, how, and why? Should HPI continue working exclusively with farmers, or should your organization try to partner with or influence other civil society actors, policy makers, agrochemical companies, or credit agencies? Ultimately, where is your comparative advantage as an institution, and what are the risks of attempting to target certain actions and ignoring others?Cornell University Division of Nutritional Science
Reclaiming the authority to plan: How the legacy of structural adjustment has affected recentralization in Bolivia
No full textProceedings of the IV World Planning Schools Congress, July 3-8th, 2016 : Global crisis, planning and challenges to spatial justice in the north and in the southThirty years after structural adjustment policies decentralized developing country governments, signs are emerging of a slow return to centralized state authority. Nearly 140 countries and over 40 international institutions agreed through the Paris Declaration and Accra Agenda for Action to “align” and “harmonize” aid efforts in support of country-led and country-owned development. Today, many Latin American governments are beginning to implement policy, bureaucratic, institutional and civil society strategies to “reclaim the role of protagonist that [they] lost as a result of decentralization” (Dickovick and Eaton 2013, 1454). What is not apparent in these agreements and emerging trends is exactly how, and how well, national governments can implement actions after reclaiming the authority to plan.
After Bolivia became one of the showpieces for structural adjustment and neoliberal reforms, by the late 1990s the size and power of the central government had shrunk considerably, local governments were taking more control of local decisions, and NGOs had rushed in to fill many social service gaps. When Evo Morales was elected President of Bolivia in 2006, he set out to take back his authority to govern numerous sectors. I consider the extent to which the Morales administration was able to achieve one its most ambitious attempts to re-establish state-led, equity-oriented development – the Zero Malnutrition (ZM) Program. The ZM program grew out of a frustration with what had become a fragmented, NGO-led health care system that had stalled efforts to reduce malnutrition.publishedVersio
Discretion As An Adaptive Device: From Expert Rule Structures To Negotiated Service Delivery
Get PDFThis policy case study of Bolivia's Zero Malnutrition Program addresses gaps in understandings of the promises and pitfalls of rational and adaptive forms of public problem solving in low-income countries. I argue that pleas to shift social change processes toward more responsive strategies must first understand why rational management strategies continue to dominate. Alternatively, we need to identify concrete adaptive strategies policy actors can, and actually do implement in practice. I consider these questions in Bolivia from the perspective of national planners who design policies, mid-level supervisors who manage programs, and frontline staff charged with program delivery. Using a grounded theory approach, methods included participate observation, document review, secondary data analysis, semi-structured interviews, "scuttlebutt informants", "itinerant actors" and action research. My findings suggest that rational planning behavior may often be a reaction to complex social change processes - coping mechanisms - instead of an approach policy designers intentionally plan or impose on implementers. Alternatively, where practitioners approach the task with a more "adaptive" mindset, I argue that considerable guidance, commitment and, paradoxically, strategy, are necessary. My dissertation begins to add specificity to what we can tell practitioners who desire to apply adaptive strategies and what planners can do to structure policy designs differently. Findings also offer lessons for theory related to policy planning and implementation. Ultimately, I advance the idea of "developmental administration" for crafting the necessary support systems, capacity-building approaches, and deliberative mechanisms that can intentionally build the ability to facilitate, build learning and continuously reinforce adaptive responses
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
A Social-Ecological Analysis of Ecological Nutrient Management using Cover Crops in the U.S. Midwest
No full textNitrogen (N) fertilizer inputs to agricultural soils are a leading cause of nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions, contributing significantly to global climate change. As an alternative to conventional fertilizers, N2 fixing legumes can provide an organic source of N that recouples N and carbon (C) cycles. Legumes can be added to crop rotations as cover crops, which are non-harvested crops that provide critical ecosystem functions including N supply and retention. Further, mixtures of cover crop species with complementary functional traits can increase multiple ecosystem functions at once. Despite the potential benefits of widespread use of cover crops, adoption is low on farms in the U.S. Midwest. Top-down constraints including policies (e.g., the Farm Bill), dominant knowledge systems and infrastructure, and concentrated grain markets create large barriers to cover crop adoption. This dissertation applies and extends a social-ecological systems framework to link cover cropping as an ecological nutrient management (ENM) practice with the social variables that influence farmer perceptions and adoption of cover crops. Chapter 1 introduces key principles of ENM and the social-ecological systems framework that guided this interdisciplinary research. To advance ecological knowledge of cover crops, in Chapter 2, I conducted a field experiment at two sites with contrasting soil fertility properties. I tested the hypothesis that a legume-grass cover crop can decrease N2O emissions compared to a sole legume during the two-week window following tillage because grass litter can decrease N mineralization rates. I found partial support for my hypothesis: the functionally-diverse legume-grass mixture led to a small reduction in N2O emissions at one site but led to a slight increase at the other. The different treatment patterns between sites suggest that interactions between cover crop functional types and background soil fertility impact N2O emissions as cover crops decompose.
In Chapter 3, I tested the hypothesis that a legume-grass mixture would provide similar N inputs as a sole legume to support corn yield, while reducing N2O losses over the whole corn growing season. The mixture supplied similar N inputs; however, I did not find significant differences in cumulative N2O emissions between treatments. A six-year N mass balance indicated N inputs and exports are approximately balanced in this agroecosystem. Historical data show that the long-term history of ENM has continued to build soil organic matter stocks, which is likely a more important driver of N cycling processes than the short-term addition of the mixture, explaining similarities between treatments.
Chapter 4 is a case study of the 2017 Cover Crop Champions peer education program. Using qualitative interviews with 24 participants, I demonstrate that bottom-up actions helped farmers overcome structural constraints to cover cropping by training farmers to use language that normalized cover crop adoption, and by leveraging farmer networks to facilitate peer education and mentorship. Despite this progress, decades of research and financial incentives have largely supported large-scale commodity production, reducing access to resources needed for farmers to transition to ENM practices. Chapter 5 integrates findings across chapters, discusses the broader social-ecological systems impacts of ecological management with cover crops, and proposes further research needs. Overall, this interdisciplinary dissertation addresses gaps in our understanding of how functionally diverse cover crops influence N cycling under different soil conditions, and how social factors including farmer networks influence attitudes towards and adoption of cover crops.PhDResource Ecology & Mgt PhDUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/172772/1/asbressl_1.pd
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
- …
