Absence Of Farms Research Articles

Ascertaining differences between farmer and non-farmer African American forest landowners in Georgia, United States

Despite the importance of farming to rural African Americans (Gilbert et al., 2002) and the role of farmers in forestland ownership, very little literature addresses the role of African American farmers in forestry. This research, based on a survey of seventy African American forest landowners in Georgia, United States, seeks to remedy this gap in the literature by exploring three research questions. First, does the absence of farms among participants affect the characterization of African American forest landowners in the literature? Second, do heirs’ property issues affect farmer forest landowners to the same degree they affect non-farmers? Third, are there significant differences in management activity between farmer and non-farm African American forest landowners? Our results suggest that farmers are less gender diverse and less well educated than non-farmers. Farmers are significantly less likely to have heirs’ property issues. Farmers are also more likely to consider passing their land on an important management goal, and overall are less likely to practice forestry-specific management. We consider these findings an important first step to understanding the role of farmers among African American forest landowners in the Southern United States and believe they will help direct future program and policy planning.

Katzie & the Wapato: An Archaeological Love Story

Archaeological site DhRp-52 is a long-lived multi-component residential site situated in the Fraser River Delta, about 50 km upriver from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The wetland wapato (also known as Indian potato, xʷəqʷəls in hənqəminəm, and Sagittaria latifolia in Latin) garden at this site was built 3800 years ago, and for the following 700 years residents of DhRp-52 managed the garden to mass produce the wapato’s wild tubers. The discovery of this garden is challenging conventional notions of Northwest Coast peoples as developing politically, ritually, and socioeconomically complex societies in the absence of farming. This paper tells the story about a time before memory when ancestors of contemporary Coast Salish qicəy (Katzie) people fell into a deep and mutual love with the wapato, building a life to accommodate their collective desires and needs. Katzie ancestors sustained their knowledge and appreciation of wapato through hundreds of generations. Today, this knowledge is being applied through experimental research and ecological restoration in Katzie territory.

Simulating the Distribution of Individual Livestock Farms and Their Populations in the United States: An Example Using Domestic Swine (Sus scrofa domesticus) Farms.

Livestock distribution in the United States (U.S.) can only be mapped at a county-level or worse resolution. We developed a spatial microsimulation model called the Farm Location and Agricultural Production Simulator (FLAPS) that simulated the distribution and populations of individual livestock farms throughout the conterminous U.S. Using domestic pigs (Sus scrofa domesticus) as an example species, we customized iterative proportional-fitting algorithms for the hierarchical structure of the U.S. Census of Agriculture and imputed unpublished state- or county-level livestock population totals that were redacted to ensure confidentiality. We used a weighted sampling design to collect data on the presence and absence of farms and used them to develop a national-scale distribution model that predicted the distribution of individual farms at a 100 m resolution. We implemented microsimulation algorithms that simulated the populations and locations of individual farms using output from our imputed Census of Agriculture dataset and distribution model. Approximately 19% of county-level pig population totals were unpublished in the 2012 Census of Agriculture and needed to be imputed. Using aerial photography, we confirmed the presence or absence of livestock farms at 10,238 locations and found livestock farms were correlated with open areas, cropland, and roads, and also areas with cooler temperatures and gentler topography. The distribution of swine farms was highly variable, but cross-validation of our distribution model produced an area under the receiver-operating characteristics curve value of 0.78, which indicated good predictive performance. Verification analyses showed FLAPS accurately imputed and simulated Census of Agriculture data based on absolute percent difference values of < 0.01% at the state-to-national scale, 3.26% for the county-to-state scale, and 0.03% for the individual farm-to-county scale. Our output data have many applications for risk management of agricultural systems including epidemiological studies, food safety, biosecurity issues, emergency-response planning, and conflicts between livestock and other natural resources.