Rebirth of a Program via Community, Industry, and Philanthropic Support

2016 ◽  
pp. 144-166
Author(s):  
Cathleen Brandi Ruch
Keyword(s):  
North Dakota ◽  
Precision Agriculture ◽  
Business Management ◽  
Management Program ◽  
State College ◽  
Lake Region ◽  
Farm Business ◽  
Program Challenges ◽  
Agricultural Farm

In 2002, Lake Region State College closed their “Agricultural Farm Business Management” program, due to low enrollment and lack of interest. However considering that agriculture is one of the leading economic developers in North Dakota, Lake Region State College (LRSC) leaders and the community felt this might have been a premature closing, and decided to look at other agriculture workforce initiatives, considering ways to revitalize the agriculture workforce and its needs. This was an ambitious goal considering how rural LRSC is, with roughly 2000 in student matriculation in a given year. Before looking at reinventing, or “rebirthing” the ag program, challenges and steps needed to be addressed and employed. The following chapter will provide a case study on how LRSC leaders, its community, and the alignment of philanthropic support was able to revitalize or “rebirth” the agriculture program to the new cutting edge of Precision Agriculture.

Rebirth of a Program via Community, Industry, and Philanthropic Support

2020 ◽  
pp. 298-315
Author(s):  
Cathleen Brandi Ruch
Keyword(s):  
North Dakota ◽  
Precision Agriculture ◽  
Business Management ◽  
Management Program ◽  
State College ◽  
Lake Region ◽  
Farm Business ◽  
Program Challenges ◽  
Agricultural Farm

In 2002, Lake Region State College closed their “Agricultural Farm Business Management” program, due to low enrollment and lack of interest. However considering that agriculture is one of the leading economic developers in North Dakota, Lake Region State College (LRSC) leaders and the community felt this might have been a premature closing, and decided to look at other agriculture workforce initiatives, considering ways to revitalize the agriculture workforce and its needs. This was an ambitious goal considering how rural LRSC is, with roughly 2000 in student matriculation in a given year. Before looking at reinventing, or “rebirthing” the ag program, challenges and steps needed to be addressed and employed. The following chapter will provide a case study on how LRSC leaders, its community, and the alignment of philanthropic support was able to revitalize or “rebirth” the agriculture program to the new cutting edge of Precision Agriculture.

scholarly journals Augmenting Crop Detection for Precision Agriculture with Deep Visual Transfer Learning—A Case Study of Bale Detection

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 23
Author(s):  
Wei Zhao ◽  
William Yamada ◽  
Tianxin Li ◽  
Matthew Digman ◽  
Troy Runge
Keyword(s):  
Object Detection ◽  
Transfer Learning ◽  
Precision Agriculture ◽  
Crop Production ◽  
Domain Adaptation ◽  
Training Data ◽  
Detection Accuracy ◽  
Detection Model ◽  
Agriculture Products

In recent years, precision agriculture has been researched to increase crop production with less inputs, as a promising means to meet the growing demand of agriculture products. Computer vision-based crop detection with unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-acquired images is a critical tool for precision agriculture. However, object detection using deep learning algorithms rely on a significant amount of manually prelabeled training datasets as ground truths. Field object detection, such as bales, is especially difficult because of (1) long-period image acquisitions under different illumination conditions and seasons; (2) limited existing prelabeled data; and (3) few pretrained models and research as references. This work increases the bale detection accuracy based on limited data collection and labeling, by building an innovative algorithms pipeline. First, an object detection model is trained using 243 images captured with good illimitation conditions in fall from the crop lands. In addition, domain adaptation (DA), a kind of transfer learning, is applied for synthesizing the training data under diverse environmental conditions with automatic labels. Finally, the object detection model is optimized with the synthesized datasets. The case study shows the proposed method improves the bale detecting performance, including the recall, mean average precision (mAP), and F measure (F1 score), from averages of 0.59, 0.7, and 0.7 (the object detection) to averages of 0.93, 0.94, and 0.89 (the object detection + DA), respectively. This approach could be easily scaled to many other crop field objects and will significantly contribute to precision agriculture.

Evaluating New York raw fiber-to-retail

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (8) ◽  
pp. 787-807
Author(s):  
Helen X Trejo ◽  
Tasha L Lewis
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Value Chain ◽  
Future Goals ◽  
Leadership Initiatives ◽  
Key Dimensions ◽  
Farm Business ◽  
Slow Fashion ◽  
Fiber Processing ◽  
Local Fiber

Inspired by the slow fashion movement, this is an exploratory case study focused on New York’s raw fiber-to-retail value chain for local clothing and textiles. New York has over 470 diverse sheep, alpaca, goat farms, fiber processing mills for product development, and fiber festivals for retail. A survey with farmers presents their motives for establishing a fiber farm business, diverse fibers available, fiber products, income, and their multiple retail venues. Interviews were conducted with farmers, fiber mill owners, and artisan designers. Primary research objectives included: (1) determining how fiber farms, mills, artisans, fiber festivals, and fiber agro-tourism intersect to sustain the current fiber community; (2) evaluating the major challenges the fiber community faces; (3) determining if stakeholders of the fiber community have benefited from any policies; and (4) understanding future goals New York raw fiber-to-fashion stakeholders have to sustain the local fiber community. Interviews reveal several leadership initiatives developed by fiber farmers to address challenges of finding a market, limited income, and fiber mill closures. This study uses the five key dimensions of slow fashion as a framework to evaluate New York raw fiber-to-retail.

Accounting without accounting

2014 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 426-464 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fábio Frezatti ◽  
David B. Carter ◽  
Marcelo F.G. Barroso
Keyword(s):  
Design Methodology ◽  
Qualitative Case Study ◽  
Management Accounting ◽  
Business Management ◽  
Accounting Information ◽  
Effective Management ◽  
Accounting Information System ◽  
Content Type ◽  
New Perspective

Purpose – An effective management accounting information system (MAIS), as well as the accounting discourse related to it, can support, facilitate, enable, and constrain diverse business discourses. This paper aims to examine the discursive and organisational effects of an organisation accounting upon absent accounting artefacts, i.e. accounting without accounting. Situated within the discursive literature, this paper examines the construction of competing articulations of the organisation by focusing on what accounting does or does not do within an organisation. In particular, the paper acknowledges the fundamental importance of the accounting discourse in supporting, facilitating, enabling, and constraining competing organisational discourses, as it illustrates how the absence of accounting centralises power within the organisation. Design/methodology/approach – From a rhetorical, discursive perspective, the authors develop an in-depth qualitative case study in a manufacturing organisation where MAIS has been abandoned for approximately two years. Interpretive research approaches, from a post-structural perspective, provided the base for the structure of the research. The authors studied how other organisational discourses (such as entrepreneurship and growth), which are traditionally constructed with reference to accounting and other artefacts, continued to be produced and sustained. The non-use and non-availability of management accounting information created a vacuum that needed to be filled. The lack of discursive counterpoints and counter-evidence provided by MAIS created a vacuum of information, allowing powerful, proxy discourses to prevail in the organisation, increasing risks to business management. Findings – The absence of MAIS to support an accounting discourse requires that contingent discourses “fill in the discursive gap”. Despite appearances, they are no substitute for the accounting discourse. Thus, over time, the entrepreneurial, growth and partners' discourses lose credibility, without the corresponding use of management accounting information and its associated discourse. Originality/value – There are at least two main contributions from the case study and the findings presented in this paper: first, they provide a new perspective for studying MAIS, as a specific organisational discourse among other discourses that shape people relationship within the organisation as an examination of accounting without accounting. Second, this discussion reinforces the relevance of accounting discourse for other organisational discourses, supporting, facilitating, enabling, and constraining them, by demonstrating the effects of its absence.

Slope Movement Inspection Using Axial Strain Data Across Multiple Lines and Repeat Inspections

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohamed ElSeify ◽  
Sylvain Cornu ◽  
Raymond Karé ◽  
Ali Fathi ◽  
John Richmond
Keyword(s):  
Axial Strain ◽  
Management Program ◽  
Additional Tool ◽  
Landslide Event ◽  
Strain Data ◽  
Risk Management Program ◽  
Geohazard Risk ◽  
Strain Responses ◽  
Repeated Runs

Abstract Axial strain inspection using the AXISS™ is an established tool in the pipeline operator’s toolbox to assess pipeline geotechnical threats and other strain related events. Consequently, there is a large database of axial strain data for several different pipelines operating in different environments and from multiple inspections at the same geographical locations. The Cheecham slope, located south east of Fort McMurray, Alberta, is a known geohazard site crossed by six individual pipelines. The lines were constructed between 1999 and 2013 and have a size range of 10” to 36”. Five out of the six lines, 12” to 36”, have been inspected using the axial strain tool. The pipelines inspected cover a range of characteristics including, different vintages, pipe diameters and positions in the ROW. These differences, and the ILI runs provide an insight into the effect of a landslide event on the strain response of these pipelines. Axial strain measurement of the multiple pipelines in the Cheecham slope’s ROW allows: i) a direct comparison between lines ii) evaluation of the strain profile across the slope iii) assessment of the magnitude of the axial strain in terms of pipe characteristics e.g. pipe vintage and mechanical properties. More importantly, the axial strain data may provide an additional tool to assess the effectiveness of strain mitigation steps carried out over the years. An increase in the frequency of axial strain ILI runs resulted in additional data being available and more importantly data from run to run inspections spread over months or sometime years. A single run captures the strain at the time of inspection but run to run inspections provide an additional comparative tool to evaluate and monitor pipeline movement. Two out of the five lines inspected have run to run axial strain data. This paper takes the Cheecham slope as a case study to discuss the benefits of run comparison of ILI axial strain data either by comparing strain values of repeated runs for a single line or by the cross comparison of strain responses of different lines in the same ROW. The paper aims to demonstrate how run to run analysis of ILI axial strain data can be implemented as part of geohazard risk management program to asses strain risk profiles of these locations and to assess the effectiveness of strain mitigation programs previously undertaken by operators.

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