Organic agricultural production in Australia: 2010-11 and 2015-16

In 2010-11 the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) included organic agriculture in its census, which was repeated in 2015-16. In this paper the progress of the Australian organic production between those two years is tracked. In 2015-16 the farm gate value of organic production in Australia was estimated at well over $1.1 billion, almost three times the value estimated five years earlier, in 2010-11. By far the largest contributor to the growth in that period was beef – with an almost six-fold increase in returns since 2010-11 – due mainly to the enormous growth in organic grazing areas (covering over 90 per cent of the area under organic agriculture in 2015-16), but also partly to an increase in beef prices in the conventional market and in premiums. However,the Australian organic sector is more than extensive grazing. There is also a more intensive agriculture with broad-acre and horticultural crops, where livestock is kept in a more intensively managed way

Shelf Sequence and Proximity Effects on Online Grocery Choices

Research on traditional store shelf effects has shown that a product’s absolute and relative shelf position may strongly affect consumer choices. In this paper, we examine whether such shelf effects are still at play in an online grocery store. While traditional ‘eye-level’ placement is no longer predominant, we find that a product’s choice probability increases when presented on the first screen or located near focal (highly-preferred) items. Our results further demonstrate that these primacy and proximity effects depend on assortment size and composition. Larger and more difficult to process assortments complicate the choice process, thereby stimulating the use of shelf-based simplifying choice heuristics.marketing ;

Institutions Under Construction: Resolving Resource Conflicts in Tanzanian Irrigation Schemes

In present-day Tanzania, the increasing market penetration, the declining predictability of water availability and the intensifying institutional pluralism make small-scale irrigation schemes interesting for studying water governance institutions under construction. By documenting how conflicts over water are solved, we focus on how power enters this process. We also show that resource conflicts are not necessarily disruptive and that institutional pluralism can contribute to the development of more sophisticated resource governance institutions. But despite the potential of such processes to improve resource governance institutions, it can also reproduce deeply entrenched gender relations and hinder inclusion of less powerful resource users as they do not always have the capability to engage in conflict resolutions in a creative fashion.irrigation, power, resource governance institutions, Africa

A classification-based approach to economic event detection in Dutch news text

Breaking news on economic events such as stock splits or mergers and acquisitions has been shown to have a substantial impact on the financial markets. As it is important to be able to automatically identify events in news items accurately and in a timely manner, we present in this paper proof-of-concept experiments for a supervised machine learning approach to economic event detection in newswire text. For this purpose, we created a corpus of Dutch financial news articles in which 10 types of company-specific economic events were annotated. We trained classifiers using various lexical, syntactic and semantic features. We obtain good results based on a basic set of shallow features, thus showing that this method is a viable approach for economic event detection in news text

A Word from the Writing Center (March 2018)

This issue includes: Writing Center News Resources for Writing and Publishing Writing Caf