Determinants and impact of adopting climate-smart brachiaria grass among dairy farmers in Kenya

Evolving changes such as population growth, urbanisation and a growing middle-income class in Africa are redefining the agro-food systems. Population growth is expected to double the demand for milk and meat products in Africa by 2050. This raises concerns on the capability of African countries to meet the projected demand. It is imperative that farmers seize the opportunities for earning higher and stable income by responding to the new trends and overcoming the constraints tightened by climate change. Access to quality fodder has continued to be the single most important challenge in livestock production systems. The objective of this article is to evaluate the impact of climate-smart Brachiaria on feed sufficiency and milk productivity in dairy production in Kenya. A random sample of 237 farmers, 111 adopters and 126 non-adopters of Brachiaria was selected in Makueni and Siaya using multi-stage sampling. Data was collected through face to face interviews and Propensity score-matching approach was then employed to evaluate the impact of Brachiaria grass on feed sufficiency and milk productivity. In this study, non-adopters of Brachiaria were farmers who were using Napier grass as their source of fodder. The findings reveal that adoption of Brachiaria increases milk production by about 27.6%. This translates to an average increase of about 3 litres daily per animal. Adoption of Brachiaria consequently increases feed sufficiency measured by time spent in feed related activities by the primary woman in a household by 31.6%. Adopters of Brachiaria spend 2 hours less in sourcing and preparing feed in dry seasons. The surplus milk implies more income for the household, improved nutrition from milk consumption and improved wealth status of household. Results on feed sufficiency imply that Brachiaria offers an alternative sustainable source of fodder in fodder scarce periods and releases the burden on women in feed related activities. There is also an improvement in the welfare of families. The study concludes that policies and efforts aimed at increasing widespread adoption should address factors that influence adoption. We recommend increasing extension and training on climate-smart fodder and strengthening collective institutions such as farmer groups for sustainable livestock production

"Burying our dead in your city": interpreting individual constructs of belonging in the context of burial of loved ones in exile.

ABSTRACT Globalization and an exponential increase in cross-border migration have led to a redefining of belonging and membership. It is argued that the question of belonging is no longer a question of residential geography and ties to location, but one that is constructed in light of a decline of the meaning of fixed place in an ever more globalized world. Globalization has facilitated a rise of alternatives to place-bound identity. Yet, when refugees face the experiences of death and burial of loved ones in exile, they seem to cling to fixed place as the base for asserting their identity and where they belong while in exile. Although where one is buried is important in many African communities, burying loved ones on foreign land does not generate rather a new sense of connection to the foreign land. Instead, refugees repudiate ties to this soil and consciously invoke references to their homeland and geographical locations in describing where they belong. This paper presents a discussion of the concepts of belonging and place in the context of compelling experiences of death and burial in exile for refugees in a globalized world

Boson Fusion and Higgs production at the LHC in six fermion final states with one charged lepton pair

Boson boson scattering and Higgs production in boson boson fusion will be actively investigated at the LHC. We have performed a parton level study of all processes of the type $q_1 q_2 \to q_3 q_4 q_5 q_6 l^+l^-$ using for the first time a full fledged six fermion Monte Carlo event generator which employs exact matrix elements at \O(\alpha_{em}^6). We have examined Higgs production in vector boson fusion followed by the decay chain $H\to ZZ\to l^+l^-jj$, including exactly all electroweak irreducible backgrounds. In the high mass region we have compared the case of a relatively light Higgs with the no-Higgs case. The integrated cross section for the latter case is more than twice that in the former for a minimum invariant mass of the $ZV$ pair of about 800 \GeV. We find, in a preliminary anlysis at parton level that, summing up the muon and the electron channels, about 30 events are expected in the light Higgs case for L=100 $fb^{-1}$.Comment: Final version published in Phys.Rev.

Vector Boson scattering at the LHC: counting experiments for unitarized models in a full six fermion approach

Unitarization models describe phenomenologically the high energy behaviour of a strongly interacting symmetry breaking sector. In this work, predictions of some unitarized models in vector boson scattering at LHC are studied and compared with analogous studies in Equivalent Vector Boson Approximation and previous results for the benchmark no-Higgs scenario. To perform such studies, unitarized model amplitudes have been implemented in the PHANTOM Monte Carlo in a complete calculation with six fermions in the final state.Comment: version accepted for publication on JHE

PHASE - An event generator for six fermion physics at the LHC

PHASE is a Monte Carlo event generator, under construction, for all Standard Model processes with six fermions in the final state at the LHC. It employs the full set of tree level Feynman diagrams, taking into account fermion masses for b quarks. The program can generate unweighted events for any subset of all six fermion final states in a single run, by making use of dedicated pre-samples. An interface to hadronization is provided.Comment: 4 pages, Latex, 1 figure. Talk given by E. Accomando at the IX International Workshop on Advanced Computing and Analysis Techniques in Physics Research (ACAT03), KEK, Tsukuba, December 1-5, 200

Hysteresis of Backflow Imprinted in Collimated Jets

We report two different types of backflow from jets by performing 2D special relativistic hydrodynamical simulations. One is anti-parallel and quasi-straight to the main jet (quasi-straight backflow), and the other is bent path of the backflow (bent backflow). We find that the former appears when the head advance speed is comparable to or higher than the local sound speed at the hotspot while the latter appears when the head advance speed is slower than the sound speed bat the hotspot. Bent backflow collides with the unshocked jet and laterally squeezes the jet. At the same time, a pair of new oblique shocks are formed at the tip of the jet and new bent fast backflows are generated via these oblique shocks. The hysteresis of backflow collisions is thus imprinted in the jet as a node and anti-node structure. This process also promotes broadening of the jet cross sectional area and it also causes a decrease in the head advance velocity. This hydrodynamic process may be tested by observations of compact young jets.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ

NNLO corrections to event shapes in e+e−e^+e^- annihilation

We compute the next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) QCD corrections to the six most important event shape variables related to three-particle final states in electron-positron annihilation. The corrections are sizeable for all variables, however their magnitude is substantially different for different observables. We observe that the NNLO corrections yield a considerably better agreement between theory and experimental data both in shape and normalisation of the event shape distributions. The renormalisation scale dependence of the theoretical prediction is substantially reduced compared to the previously existing NLO results. Our results will allow a precise determination of the strong coupling constant from event shape data collected at LEP.Comment: 30 pages, LaTeX, numercial results corrected for oversubtraction of large-angle soft radiatio

Perturbative rates and colour rearrangement effects in four-jet events at LEP2

An important issue in the direct reconstruction method of determining the W mass from q\bar q Q\bar Q events at LEP2 concerns the impact of the relatively unknown QCD interconnection effects. It has been suggested that a study of `short string' states, in which colour singlet states are formed from q \bar Q and Q\bar q pairs with small phase--space separation, could shed important light on this issue. We show that such configurations can also be generated by conventional background e^+e^-\ar 4~parton processes, in particular QCD q \bar q g g and q \bar q Q \bar Q and non--resonant electroweak q \bar q Q \bar Q production. We study the colour and kinematic structure of these background contributions, and estimate the event rate to be expected at LEP2. We find that the QCD processes are heavily suppressed, but that non--resonant q \bar q Q \bar Q production may be comparable in rate to the expected `short string' signal from W^+W^- production