Browsing by Subject "Production"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Characterization of Sphagnum Top Moss: Ecology and Market: Final Progress Report
    (University of Minnesota Duluth, 1995-02) Johnson, Kurt W
    The final progress and financial report on this project is to evaluate the feasibility of commercializing sphagnum top moss production in Minnesota.
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    Market Analysis and Productivity of Aquaponics in Minnesota
    (2018-09) Abbey, Marie
    Aquaponics, the combination of hydroponics and aquaculture into one growing system, continues to gain popularity on both a hobby and commercial scale. Many studies have been conducted to improve production methods, but few have examined consumer preferences for and attitudes toward aquaponics. The first chapter contributes knowledge to this area with results from an experimental auction that explored consumer preferences and identified potential market segments, with each segment having distinct preferences for produce grown in aquaponics systems. Using latent class analysis, participants were segmented into three classes. Two classes (totaling 70% of participants) were willing to pay more for aquaponically-grown lettuce than for the potting soil-grown counterparts; however, all bids were relatively low for a premium lettuce product. For all three segments, consumers’ increased rating of lettuce appearance and flavor had a significant positive impact on their bids. Consumers willing to pay the highest price premium reported the highest environmental concerns and product quality. Typical horticulture aquaponic production focuses on leafy greens and herbs with no known studies on the production potential of strawberries (Fragaria ✕ananassa Duchesne) or any other perennial crop. The second chapter compares day-neutral strawberry yield of ‘Albion’, ‘Evie 2’ and ‘Portola’ in aquaponic productions with different variables of strawberry yield in greenhouse production using soilless medium. There was no addition of supplemental nutrients or pollinators to the systems in order to evaluate the differences between treatments. We found a significant difference among cultivars in number of fruit, fresh fruit weight, and dry fruit weight with ‘Evie 2’ having the highest yield in all. There was no significant difference in the number of fruit produced by strawberries grown in soilless medium and those grown aquaponically. We did, however, find that aquaponic strawberries had a significantly higher fresh fruit weight while strawberries grown in soilless medium had a significantly higher dry fruit weight. This indicates that strawberries grown in soilless medium have a higher mass to water ratio, although aquaponic-grown strawberries can have a higher fresh weight yield.
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    Production and Wind Dispersal of Canada Thistle (Cirsium arvense L.) Achenes
    (Minnesota Department of Transportation, 2008-09) Becker, R.L.; Haar, M.J.; Kinkaid, B.D.; Klossner, L.D.; Forcella, F.
    Quantity, quality and dispersal distance of wind-blown achenes and pappi were determined during the peak time of dispersal over twelve site-years in Minnesota during 2006 and 2007. Approximately twice as many pappi than achenes were trapped. Wind blown pappi tend to travel near the ground. Most achenes fell near the parent plants and their population density declined exponentially with increasing distance. Over 80% of pappi collected did not have an achene attached. Concomitantly, seed production in Canada thistle was monitored for 8 site-years in Minnesota. Averaged across years and locations, female Canada thistle shoots that flowered produced an average of 38% empty, 17% shrunken, and 44% normal achenes. Male shoots produce about half the number of seedheads compared to female shoots. A low level of hermaphroditic expression was observed in male shoots. Though seed production by female Canada thistle is extremely variable, when sufficient pollen is available, Canada thistle clearly has the potential to generate significant contributions to seedbanks to maintain invasive stands. However, dispersal by wind is for the most part, local. Long distance dispersal of significant numbers of healthy achenes would be a rare event.
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    Three Essays on the Economics of Price Volatility
    (2017-04) Lee, Yu Na
    This dissertation is about how commodity price volatility affects the decision making and welfare of economic agents. The three essays in this dissertation focus on food prices, the volatility of which has been an important topic of policy discussions in the wake of the global food crises of 2008 and 2010-11. In the first essay, I examine whether food price volatility causes rural-to-urban migration. Using longitudinal household survey data from rural Ethiopia, I find strong and robust evidence that the greater a household's willingness to pay to stabilize food prices, the more likely that household is to see one of its members migrate, a relationship that is more pronounced in villages that lack alternative coping strategies to mitigate the negative welfare effects of price volatility. Thus, my results provide evidence that migration is a strategy that smallholder farmers rely on to cope with food price volatility in the absence of well-functioning credit and insurance markets. The second and third essays are experimental studies motivated by a need for a clean identification of producer decision making under price volatility. In the second essay, my co-authors and I test Sandmo’s (1971) canonical theory of producer behavior under output price uncertainty using a novel experimental protocol. We find that, in stark contradiction with Sandmo's theoretical prediction, which stems from expected utility theory, the presence of price uncertainty causes subjects to produce more than they do under price certainty, but we also find that increases in the degree of price uncertainty cause them to decrease their production. Perhaps more importantly, we also find that subjects exhibit behavior consistent with prospect theory. In the third essay, we generate unique experimental data to examine how individuals make production decisions under price ambiguity, in which probability distributions of prices are unknown to experimental subjects. We find that, when producers have to make production decisions lacking such information, context matters a great deal, and individuals rely on past realization of prices as well as heuristics to facilitate decision making.