Citations are increasingly used to indicate the quality of an academic unit's work. The set of literature or journals, however, becomes crucial to any ranking scheme. Citations from the broadly based Social Science Citations Index suggest a different ranking of departments than the ranking obtained from a somewhat narrowly focused set of North American journals of agricultural economics. The paper seeks to determine the influence of regional journals, joint authorship, and self‐citations on departmental rankings. Data bases of citations are developed for the faculty of seventy‐three departments of agricultural economics in the United States and Canada.
Entrepreneurs innovate their individual business organizations not only to deal with production and price risks, but also to cope with the risk of sanctions or penalties imposed by society's laws and regulations. More specifically, labor-intensive agricultural firms, faced with potentially large fines for violation of immigration and labor laws, increasingly modify the organization of their firms by shifting the management of routine seasonal labor jobs to independent farm labor contractors. The use of labor contracting is further intensified because of the effectiveness of labor contractors in the recruitment of illegal aliens.
The industrialization of American agriculture during the past three decades has diminished farm numbers and the farm population. While total agricultural production has increased, the input, finance, service, processing, transportation, and distribution industries surrounding production agriculture have now become the dominant economic components of the food and agriculture system. The transformation of production agriculture from a major economic sector of the United States economy to minor status has been in progress since the founding days of the Republic, but has received impetus in the post-World War II era via the technological revolution involving mechanical, chemical, biological, and managerial innovations on the farm. What has emerged from this process is a highly interdependent subsystem of the United States economy for providing food and fiber for consumers at home and abroad. Agricultural scientists, including agricultural economists, have tended to place undue emphasis upon the technological, economic, and social aspects of production agriculture as the food and fiber system changed over time. While public investments in research and education for the production side of agriculture are admittedly inadequate, the lack of attention to the technological and economic problems of the balance of the food and fiber system is deplorable. In terms of value added, employment, or other measures of economic importance, the food and fiber system beyond the farm gate is roughly twice that of production agriculture. More significantly, productivity and inflation problems beyond the farm gate have affected national economic performance more persistently than gyrations in the farm economy per se.
Ranking of agricultural economics departments based upon the number of articles or article pages does not take into account the impact or usefulness of these journal articles or other works to the profession. In this paper, an alternative ranking scheme is employed which utilizes citations from a broad array of publications of a department's faculty. Rankings are developed for agricultural economics units at 1862 land grant universities, 1890 land grant universities, independent U.S. universities, and Canadian universities, as well as an overall composite ranking and comparisons with economics departments.
Extension of John Stollsteimer's one product model to encompass the multiple product case is the primary aim of the paper. Both the one and multiple product models attempt to determine the number, size, and location of plants that minimize combined transportation and processing costs. The multiple product model differs from Stollsteimer's model in that aggregate assembly costs are affected by varying locational patterns as the product dimension is increased and that total processing cost varies both with the number of plants and the combination of products handled at each optimum plant location. A comparison of one and multiple product processing of identical quantities of raw product results in an economic advantage for multiple product processing.B E CAUSE of the seasonal nature of agricultural production, processing establishments often extend the length of their season and/or increase plant output by handling two or more commodities. When fresh and perishable commodities are unavailable, processors may also process nonseasonal items in order to lengthen the processing season and/or augment overall volume.While Stollsteimer's "Working Model for Plant Numbers and Locations" provides an excellent operational tool for determining the number, size, and location of plants that minimize combined transportation and processing costs, it does so for only one raw material or product.'The purpose of this paper is to somewhat "generalize" the model to permit multiple product processing. An application of the model is illustrated for a case involving three raw and final products (sweet potatoes, okra, and tomatoes),~5 producing origins, and 10 potential processing locations in Louisiana.It is assumed that okra and tomatoes are processed simultaneously because of the coincident harvesting season in the state, while sweet potatoes are processed in a subsequent period.
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