scholarly journals Perspectives on the Management of Surplus Dairy Calves in the United States and Canada

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Creutzinger ◽  
Jessica Pempek ◽  
Gregory Habing ◽  
Kathryn Proudfoot ◽  
Samantha Locke ◽  
...  

The care of surplus dairy calves is a significant issue for the United States and Canadian dairy industries. Surplus dairy calves commonly experience poor welfare as evidenced by high levels of mortality and morbidity, and negative affective states resulting from limited opportunities to express natural behaviors. Many of these challenges are a result of a disaggregated production system, beginning with calf management at the dairy farm of origin and ending at a calf-raising facility, with some calves experiencing long-distance transportation and commingling at auction markets or assembly yards in the interim. Thus, the objectives of this narrative review are to highlight specific challenges associated with raising surplus dairy calves in the U.S. and Canada, how these challenges originate and could be addressed, and discuss future directions that may start with refinements of the current system, but ultimately require a system change. The first critical area to address is the management of surplus dairy calves on the dairy farm of origin. Good neonatal calf care reduces the risk of disease and mortality, however, many dairy farms in Canada and the U.S. do not provide sufficient colostrum or nutrition to surplus calves. Transportation and marketing are also major issues. Calves can be transported more than 24 consecutive hours, and most calves are sold through auction markets or assembly yards which increases disease exposure. Management of calves at calf-raisers is another area of concern. Calves are generally housed individually and fed at low planes of nutrition, resulting in poor affective states and high rates of morbidity and mortality. Strategies to manage high-risk calves identified at arrival could be implemented to reduce disease burden, however, increasing the plane of nutrition and improving housing systems will likely have a more significant impact on health and welfare. However, we argue the current system is not sustainable and new solutions for surplus calves should be considered. A coordinated and holistic approach including substantial change on source dairy farms and multiple areas within the system used to market and raise surplus dairy calves, can lead to more sustainable veal and beef production with improved calf outcomes.

2015 ◽  
Vol 117 (5) ◽  
pp. 1-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Zeichner ◽  
César Peña-Sandoval

Background & Purpose This article focuses on the growing role of venture philanthropy in shaping policy and practice in teacher education in the United States. Our goal is to bring a greater level of transparency to private influences on public policy and to promote greater discussion and debate in the public arena about alternative solutions to current problems. In this article, we focus on the role of one of the most influential private groups in the United States that invests in education, the New Schools Venture Fund (NSVF), in promoting deregulation and market-based policies. Research Design We examine the changing role of philanthropy in education and the role of the NSVF in developing and promoting a bill in the U.S. Congress (the GREAT Act) that would create a system throughout the nation of charter teacher and principal preparation programs called academies. In assessing the wisdom of the GREAT Act, we examine the warrant for claims that education schools have failed in their mission to educate teachers well and the corresponding narrative that entrepreneurial programs emanating from the private sector are the solution. Conclusions We reject both the position that the status quo in teacher education is acceptable (a position held by what we term “defenders”) and the position that the current system needs to be “blown up” and replaced by a market economy (“reformers”). We suggest a third position (“transformers”) that we believe will strengthen the U.S. system of public teacher education and provide everyone's children with high-quality teachers. We conclude with a call for more trenchant dialogue about the policy options before us and for greater transparency about the ways that private interests are influencing public policy and practice in teacher education.


1997 ◽  
Vol 1576 (1) ◽  
pp. 132-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vukan R. Vuchic ◽  
Yong Eun Shin ◽  
Eric C. Bruun ◽  
Nikola Krstanoski

All developed countries experience similar trends and problems in urban transportation: growth of cities and affluence result in an increase in car dependency. Increased volumes of car travel lead to congestion and many negative effects, often termed as the “collision of cities and cars.” A review of urban transportation policies and their implementation in the United States and its peer countries—Australia, Canada, and countries in Western Europe and East Asia—indicates that all peer countries except Great Britain place major emphasis on maintaining the human orientation of cities. They pursue policies aimed at achieving multimodal transportation systems and preventing automobile dominance. The United States, after significant strides in that direction up to 1980, has returned to policies favoring car travel and reducing support for alternative modes—transit, bicycles, and walking. This trend largely ignores the spirit and mandates of the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991. The gap between the United States and its peer countries is increasing. Present U.S. policies are likely to aggravate this situation. An example is presented: New York is compared with its peer cities in accessibility for long-distance travel. Its competitiveness in this respect is lagging. This trend cannot be ignored. As its peers learned from the U.S. experiences in highway and traffic engineering in the past, the U.S. should now learn from its peers how to avoid total car dependence and implement multimodal transportation systems to improve the livability of its metropolitan areas.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Flagg ◽  
Paul Harris

The United States must adopt a new approach to R&D policy to optimize the diversity of the current system, manage the risks of system dispersion and deliver the benefits of R&D to society. This policy brief provides a new framework for understanding the U.S. R&D ecosystem and recommendations for repositioning the role of the federal government in R&D.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-64
Author(s):  
William Lazonick ◽  
Matt Hopkins

With just 4.2 percent of the world’s population, the United States had, as of July 21, 2020, 26.0 percent of its confirmed Covid-19 cases and 23.1 percent of its deaths. The magnitude of the tragedy raises the critically important counterfactual question of how the United States as a nation would have fared had there been competent and committed political leadership in place when, during January 2020, intelligence indicating the severity of the unfolding pandemic became available. A partial answer to this question lies in identifying the organizational and technological capabilities to develop, produce, and deliver “countermeasures”—personal protective equipment (PPE), ventilators, diagnostic tests, therapies, and vaccines—that a prepared federal administration would have been able to mobilize to respond to the pandemic. Main repositories of the necessary capabilities are government agencies and business firms, with the development, production, and delivery of countermeasures heavily reliant on government-business collaborations (GBCs). We contend that the success of projects for pandemic preparedness and response depends on the strength of GBCs. In this essay, we focus on the particular case of ventilators for the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS). We trace the historical evolution within the federal government of the current system of pandemic preparedness for and response through the end of the Obama administration. We then analyze the particular GBCs to develop ventilators for the SNS initiated and implemented by the Biomedical Research and Development Authority (BARDA), under the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). BARDA initiated two successive GBCs, one beginning in 2010 and the second in 2014, with two different business firms, for the purpose of developing portable, easy-to-use, and affordable ventilators for the SNS. We show that the strength of these collaborations lay with the innovative ventilator manufacturers with which BARDA contracted. The weakness of these GBCs appeared when these innovative manufacturers fell under the control of business corporations committed to the ideology of “maximizing shareholder value” (MSV). In each case, the financialized business corporation undermined development and delivery of ventilators to the SNS. We then explain why, in general, we should expect that business firms driven by MSV will be unreliable partners in GBCs—at the expense of the nation’s preparedness for and response to an emergency such as the Covid-19 pandemic. This lack of reliability is rooted in the strategic orientation of corporations which have put stock-market valuation of the company ahead of its innovative performance in producing goods and services. The Covid-19 crisis has already revealed the extent to which, in the U.S. economy, the stock market functions not to support value creation but rather as the prime means of value extraction. The most overt form of value extraction is the corporate practice of open-market repurchases of the company’s own shares—aka stock buybacks—typically done in addition to copious distributions to shareholders in the form of cash dividends. In the decade 2010-2019, companies in the S&P 500 Index spent $5.3 trillion on buybacks, representing 54 percent of net income, in addition to $3.8 trillion (39 percent of net income) distributed to shareholders as dividends. In view of this “predatory value extraction,” we conclude this essay with the “$5.3 trillion” question for executives and directors of corporations who, in their embrace of MSV ideology, must bear significant responsibility for the failure of the United States to respond to not only the Covid-19 pandemic but also climate change and income inequity. The question: Why does the company that you head do stock buybacks? In particular, we direct this question to the executives and directors of three corporations that, as of the year 2020, are the biggest repurchasers of their own stock in history: Microsoft at number three, ExxonMobil at number two, and Apple at number one. We also pose this question to the senior executives and board members of any company engaged in the practice who, in August 2019, signed the Business Roundtable (BRT) Statement of the Purpose of a Corporation, which explicitly rejected the BRT’s 1997 pronouncement that “corporations exist principally to serve shareholders,” replacing it with a redefinition of “the purpose of the corporation to promote ‘an economy that serves all Americans’.”


2010 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark A Jamison ◽  
James Sichter

Structural and functional separation of telecommunications operators is being considered in many parts of the world following the U.K. functional separation of BT into retail and network operations. The attractiveness of separation is understandable due to the problems regulators often experience when regulating a monopoly that is vertically integrated into competitive markets, but separation in practice rarely if ever lives up to its promises. We examine experiences with business separation in the United States to draw lessons about its effects. We consider the separation of local and long distance, separation between telecommunications and information services, and separation between wholesale networks and retail services. These experiences show that business separation lowers efficiency and delays innovation, that adapting separation rules to an ever changing industry is costly and creates controversies, that rivals try to gain strategic advantage through the regulatory process, and that behavioral rules can be more effective in facilitating competition and innovation than structural rules.


1982 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert A. Milligan ◽  
Caroline J. Nowak ◽  
Wayne A. Knoblauch

On most Northeastern dairy farms bull calves are considered a superfluous output and are sent to auction markets as soon as possible after they are born. The excess supply situation in the United States dairy industry combined with other obstacles to dairy herd expansion has resulted in dairy producers seeking expansion options other than increased dairy herd size. Several alternatives for expanding the dairy farm business that utilize bull calves as a resource are possible. Dairy beef systems that are most complementary to the ongoing dairy business should be particularly attractive.


2006 ◽  
Vol 96 (4) ◽  
pp. 400-407 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shimon Pivonia ◽  
X. B. Yang

Soybean rust, Phakopsora pachyrhizi, has been considered a threat to the production of the U.S. soybean, Glycine max. During the past decade, this disease gradually spread to Africa, South America, and recently to the United States. Previous soybean rust risk assessments with an assumption of availability of spores early in a season showed that weather conditions (dew and temperature) during a growing season, in general, are suitable for disease development in U.S. soybean-growing regions. Predicting the time of rust appearance in a field is critical to determining the destructive potential of rusts, including soybean rust. In this study, comparative epidemiology was used to assess likely rust incipient time in four locations within the U.S. Soybean Belt from south to north: Baton Rouge, LA; Charlotte, NC; Indianapolis, IN; and Minneapolis, MN. Temperature effects on the infection cycle of five rusts occurring in the Midwest were evaluated using a general disease model. The likely incipient times were examined with the modeling results. Among the rusts studied, early-appearing rusts had suitable conditions for development earlier in a season. However, a lag period of several weeks to more than 3 months was found from the time when conditions are suitable for a rust to develop or when hosts are available to the time when the rust was detected in fields. Length of the lag period differed among the rust species examined. If nature of long-distance dispersal is not significantly different among the rusts, implications of our study to the expected seasonal soybean rust incipience in fields lead to two possible scenarios: (i) average appearance time of soybean rust across the Soybean Belt should be somewhere between appearance times of common corn rust and southern corn rust, and (ii) with late appearance of the disease, late-planted soybean in the south has greater risk.


1991 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuzo Murayama

This article examines the determinants of interprefectural patterns of Japanese emigration to the U.S. Pacific Northwest, using a multiple regression analysis. In estimating the regression equations, new proxies are introduced for the “family- and-friends” effect that are free of the statistical problems common in previous studies on long-distance migration. The result shows that the information networks that developed between pioneer immigrants and their home districts played a central role in shaping emigration patterns. The lack of an alternative means of obtaining reliable information about conditions in the United States appears to be responsible.


2007 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 385-408 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Eric Jessup

In response to the Klondike gold rush, the U.S. Army established isolated forts throughout Alaska. Between 1900 and 1905, the Signal Corps connected those posts with each other and with the contiguous United States by means of the Washington-Alaska Military Cable and Telegraph System (WAMCATS). A significant logistical and technological achievement, the system of thousands of miles of suspended landlines and underwater cable included the first successful long-distance radio operation in the world. The first physical link between the United States and Alaska, the telegraph was also the first major contribution to Alaskan infrastructure provided by the federal government, marking the beginning of the government's central role in the development of Alaska.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-86
Author(s):  
Vincentia Vahistha Hirrya Jyalita

China’s rise through rapid development especially in the economic sector have prompted debates on whether it seeks to overtake the United States (U.S.) and strive for domination. However, China insists that it has no such intentions since it benefits from the current system and wishes to pursue peaceful development. This paper will analyze why China is not seeking to displace the U.S. and alter the international order despite claims from offensive realism that states are revisionist as they pursue domination to guarantee its survival under anarchy. This paper argues that defensive realism can better explain the case and that China is a status quo state unlike claims from offensive realism. The writer conducted the study with defensive realism’s perspective and utilized indicators from Steve Chan, Weixing Hu, and Kai He to determine whether China is a status quo state. The results show that defensive realism can fill the gap left by offensive realism and that China is indeed a status quo state. Kebangkitan China yang ditandai dengan perkembangan pesat, terutama dalam bidang ekonomi, telah memicu perdebatan tentang apakah China berusaha untuk mengambil alih kekuasaan Amerika Serikat (A.S.) dan mendominasi tatanan global. Namun, China bersikeras dalam mengklaim bahwa tidak ada niat seperti itu karena mendapatkan keuntungan dari sistem saat ini dan lebih ingin mengejar pembangunan secara damai. Artikel ini akan menganalisis mengapa China tidak berusaha untuk menggantikan A.S. maupun mengubah tatanan global, meskipun ada klaim dari offensive realism bahwa setiap negara adalah revisionist karena mereka memperluas kekuasaannya untuk menjamin kelangsungan hidupnya di bawah sistem dunia yang anarki. Dalam artikel ini, penulis berpendapat bahwa defensive realism dapat menjelaskan kasus ini dengan lebih baik dan China adalah negara status quo tidak seperti klaim dari offensive realism. Penulis melakukan studi dengan perspektif defensive realism dan menggunakan indikator dari Steve Chan, Weixing Hu, dan Kai He untuk menentukan apakah China merupakan negara status quo. Hasilnya menunjukkan bahwa defensive realism dapat mengisi kekosongan yang ditinggalkan oleh offensive realism dan bahwa China memang negara status quo.


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