Farming Community (farming + community)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


The Impacts of Supermarket Procurement on Farming Communities in India: Evidence from Rural Karnataka

DEVELOPMENT POLICY REVIEW, Issue 4 2010
Bill Pritchard
The rapid expansion of supermarket retailing, with its impact on farmer communities, represents a contentious part of India's recent economic development. This article reports on three districts of Karnataka, where a survey of 78 farmers supplying fruits and vegetables to Reliance Fresh, a leading supermarket chain, reveals low levels of vertical co-ordination, a lack of written contracts, and highly competitive environments, with the quality parameters used by supermarkets specifying only a limited set of conditions. These findings suggest that supermarket-led restructuring in India has not yet reached a stable institutional situation. [source]


Placing Animals in the Neolithic: Social Zooarchaeology of Prehistoric Farming Communities

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Issue 3 2006
JULIE ZIMMERMANN-HOLT
Placing Animals in the Neolithic: Social Zooarchaeology of Prehistoric Farming Communities. Arkadiusz Marciniak. Portland: Cavendish Publishing, 2005. 279 pp. [source]


Rights and Access to Plant Genetic Resources under India's New Law

DEVELOPMENT POLICY REVIEW, Issue 4 2004
Anitha Ramanna
Recognition of ,Farmer's Rights' is an attempt by developing countries to evolve a counterclaim to breeders' Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) promoted under the TRIPs Agreement of the WTO. India is one of the first countries to have granted rights to both breeders and farmers under the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers' Rights Act, 2001. This multiple rights system aims to distribute rights equitably, but may pose the threat of an ,anticommons tragedy' i.e. too many parties independently possessing the right to exclude others from utilising a resource. If under-utilisation of plant genetic resources results, the Act will have negative consequences for sustaining crop productivity and for the welfare of the very farming communities it seeks to compensate. [source]


Exploring social capital in rural settlements of an islander region in Greece

JOURNAL OF COMMUNITY & APPLIED SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 2 2010
Anastasia Zissi
Abstract This paper reports on a large scale cross-sectional study examining subjective perceptions of community social life held by a randomly selected sample of residents (n,=,428) in all small rural settings (n,=,89) of the region of North Aegean Sea. The notion of social capital was used as a conceptual tool in order to explore different aspects of the relational life of contemporary rural communities. This study has two aims: First to provide an account of rural residents' perceptions of village life in terms of interpersonal support, mutual aid, trust, social cohesion and community competence, and second to examine the suitability of the social capital notion within the specific cultural context. A combination of data collection procedures and a range of sources were employed, such as key informants, rural residents and researchers' field observations. The findings indicate that small farming communities of high devotion with deep roots and strong sense of belonging face severe demographic imbalance and experience low civic power given the limited links with external agents. The mainstream notion of social capital as an unconditionally beneficial factor is thus questioned. The findings call for revisiting its relevance across communities with varying capacities and needs. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


MORE THAN ONE WAY TO STUDY A BUILDING: APPROACHES TO PREHISTORIC HOUSEHOLD AND SETTLEMENT SPACE

OXFORD JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGY, Issue 3 2006
MARION CUTTING
Summary. This article reviews a number of research methodologies used to record household and settlement architecture and assesses their value in the investigation of the human use of prehistoric built space. It exemplifies, through case studies, five broad approaches to, and research techniques associated with, the investigation of such architecture. These approaches are: architectural form; the spatial distribution of activities; continuity and standardization; the relationship between built and non-built space; and human patterns of movement. Then, drawing mainly on Near Eastern, and particularly Anatolian, material, it shows how a sixth approach, the use of ethnographic observation and analogy, provides insights into functional and seasonal variations in spatial use, patterns of movement and social organization. It identifies seven categories of data collection and nine observations drawn from the ethnographic material which together provide an investigative and interpretative framework for the study of early farming communities in the Near East and elsewhere. [source]


A past and a future for diversification on farms?

GEOGRAFISKA ANNALER SERIES B: HUMAN GEOGRAPHY, Issue 1 2003
Some evidence from large-scale, commercial farms in South East England
Abstract Diversification has been identified as a common response to the agricultural crisis of the 1980s and to the changing ethos of agricultural policy in the closing decade of the twentieth century. In particular, farmers operating large-scale farms have been prominent in adopting this approach, just as they were innovative across a range of farming practices in the expansion and modernisation of their agricultural production in earlier decades. Can we identify serial diversifiers within this sector of the farming community, who are disposed to react in an entrepreneurial fashion to the changing fortunes of agriculture? The paper draws on results from a survey of large-scale commercial farmers in South East England and, by examining the sequence in which various forms of diversification were adopted, identifies a temporal pattern as farmers responded to the fluctuating fortunes of the agricultural industry over the past thirty years. But has the potential for diversification been exhausted? The paper also considers future prospects for diversification within the large-scale, commercially oriented sector of the agricultural industry. [source]


Surveillance and measuring trends of stroke in Japan: The Takashima Stroke Registry (1988 , present)

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF STROKE, Issue 2 2007
Yoshikuni Kita
This stroke registry is a population-based, prospective, observational study whose objective is to monitor trends in the incidence and case-fatality of stroke in Japan. Takashima County is located in the rural area of the Shiga prefecture in central Japan, having a stable population of approximately 54,000. It is a farming community with similar cultural values and standards of living throughout the region. The population has remained fairly stable during the 16-year study period. 1750 stroke cases (men 937 and women 813) were registered during 1988,2002. The average ages of the men and women patients were 69.4 and 74.4 years respectively. Stroke diagnostic criteria are established for the Monitoring System for Cardiovascular Disease commissioned by the Ministry of Health and Welfare, Japan. These criteria were based on WHO-MONICA project. Takashima registry system was planned to capture all the cases in the study area by covering all the hospitals of the county. To ensure that eligible patients hospitalized outside the county were not omitted, registration procedures were also conducted at three high-level medical facilities within the Shiga region but outside the county. Due to the high rate of computed tomography use in Japan the identification of stroke cases within the study area is almost complete and stroke diagnosis and classification are accurately recorded. [source]


Introduction of agriculture and its effects on women's oral health

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF HUMAN BIOLOGY, Issue 1 2010
James T. Watson
This study explores the dynamic relationship between the introduction of agriculture and its effects on women's oral health by testing the hypothesis that female reproductive physiology contributes to an oral environment more susceptible to chronic oral disease and that, in a population undergoing the foraging to farming transition, females will exhibit a higher prevalence of oral pathology than males. This is tested by comparing the presence, location, and severity of caries lesions and antemortem tooth loss across groups of reproductive aged and postreproductive females (n = 71) against corresponding groups of males (n = 71) in an Early Agricultural period (1600 B.C.,A.D. 200) skeletal sample from northwest Mexico. Caries rates did not differ by sex across age groups in the sample; however, females were found to exhibit significantly more antemortem tooth loss than males (P > 0.01). Differences were initially minimal but increased by age cohort until postreproductive females experienced a considerable amount of tooth loss, during a life stage when the accumulation of bodily insults likely contributed to dental exfoliation. Higher caries rates in females are often cited as the result of gender differences and dietary disparities in agricultural communities. In an early farming community, with diets being relatively equal, women were found to experience similar caries expression but greater tooth loss. We believe this differential pattern of oral pathology provides new evidence in support of theinterpretation that women's oral health is impacted by effects relating to reproductive biology. Am. J. Hum. Biol. 2010. © 2009 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source]


Safety knowledge, safety behaviors, depression, and injuries in Colorado farm residents

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF INDUSTRIAL MEDICINE, Issue 1 2010
Cheryl L. Beseler PhD
Abstract Background Changing safety behavior has been the target of injury prevention in the farming community for years but significant reductions in the number of farming injuries have not always followed. This study describes the relationships between safety knowledge, safety behavior, depression, and injuries using 3 years of self-reported data from a cohort of farm residents in Colorado. Methods Farm operators and their spouses (n,=,652) were recruited in 1993 from a farm truck registration list using stratified probability sampling. Respondents answered ten safety knowledge and ten safety behavior questions. The Center for Epidemiologic Studies-Depression (CES-D) scale was used to evaluate depression. The most severe farm work-related injury over a 3-year period was the outcome variable. Factor analysis was used to produce a single measure of safety knowledge for logistic regression models to evaluate the relationships between injuries, safety knowledge, and behaviors. Results Safety knowledge was significantly associated with wearing personal protective equipment. None of the safety behaviors were significantly associated with injuries. In the presence of depression, low safety knowledge increased the probability of injury (OR 3.87, 95% CI 1.00,15.0) in models adjusted for age, sex, hours worked per week, and financial problems. Compared to those not depressed, those depressed with a low safety score showed significantly greater risk of injury than those depressed with a high score in adjusted models (OR 3.09, CI 1.31,7.29 vs. OR 0.86, CI 0.31,2.37). Conclusions Future work on injuries in the farming community should include measures of mood disorders and interactions with safety perceptions and knowledge. Am. J. Ind. Med. 53:47,54, 2010. © 2009 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source]


Hearing loss among Ohio farm youth: A comparison to a national sample

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF INDUSTRIAL MEDICINE, Issue 3 2009
Katherine M. Renick MS
Abstract Background Hearing loss is prevalent among adults in the farming community, with some evidence it begins in childhood. Our objective was to compare hearing thresholds of Ohio farm youth to published data on national norms. Methods Baseline data were collected on youth (n,=,212) in 1994,1996 with follow-up (n,=,132) in 2003,2004 including pure-tone air conduction thresholds at 0.5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and 8 kHz. Results When compared to nationally-representative data, study youth had a higher prevalence of hearing loss. The high-frequency range was most affected, particularly at 6 kHz where nearly 50% of the farm youth exhibited some degree of hearing loss at baseline testing. The prevalence of noise-induced threshold shifts, characterized by an audiometric notch, was nearly twice that of the national sample. Conclusions These data suggest that hearing loss, which is common among adult farmers, may be problematic for farm youth as well. Am. J. Ind. Med. 52:233,239, 2009. © 2008 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source]


Front and Back Covers, Volume 25, Number 1.

ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY, Issue 1 2009
February 200
Front cover caption, volume 25 issue 1 A boy shows off on his horse at the annual festival of racing, games and music in Barsko'on, Kyrgyzstan in October 2007. The festival includes endurance races of up to 36 kilometres over steep, rocky mountain paths and streams, a far cry from the bowling-green surfaces of Churchill Downs and Newmarket. Abdildechan, an expert in horse games in Kyzyl Suu, explained that horse games and competitions such as these derive from the importance of horses to the nomadic and warrior traditions of the Kyrgyz people. Horses enable people to move away from danger, he explained, and are also essential for work and food. Cars are becoming increasingly common in Kyrgyzstan, but many people believe that they will never completely replace horses in this mountainous region. ,Young people may have cars', says shepherd Jakshylyck Orgochor, ,but where there is a Kyrgyz person there is always a horse: a horse is a man's wings'. In this issue, Rebecca Cassidy scrutinizes claims about the distinctiveness of the Kyrgyz horse and considers the political consequences of evaluating domesticated animals on the basis of contested categories including ,breed' and ,type'. Back Cover: HUMAN-ANIMAL RELATIONS Ros Coard, lecturer in archaeology and specialist in archaeozoology and forensic taphonomy in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Wales Lampeter, examines forensic evidence taken from the scene of a suspected big cat kill in West Wales, UK. The skulls in the foreground belong to an array of known big cat species, and Coard compared tooth pit data from these skulls with those found in sheep and horses killed in unusual circumstances. These data have been used to provide evidence for the existence of at least one large predatory felid in West Wales. However, even without this scientific corroboration, many people around the UK report sightings of non-endemic ,alien' big cats (ABCs) on a regular basis, attributing to them an almost mythical status, and this makes them an interesting phenomenon to be considered from an anthropological perspective. Coard has been working collaboratively with Samantha Hurn, an anthropologist who has been documenting narratives relating to big cat sightings in West Wales. In this issue of ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY, Hurn outlines the data collected so far. She argues that ABCs do, indeed, exist in West Wales, and discusses how and why her informants from the local Welsh farming community regard these predators in positive terms. Many see ABCs as both important keystone species performing the valuable function of keeping other problematic predators (notably foxes) in check, and highly politicized animals who symbolize their own marginalized position within contemporary UK society. As Lévi-Strauss put it long ago, animal-human relations are, indeed, good to think with. [source]