“Rural Development” is a phrase much in the news and literature. Both the terms rural and development are used somewhat ambiguously, though the niceties of having quantitative measures for each term are readily recognized by researchers. Although what constitutes development and how it should be measured is a very important question, the focus of this paper is on the term rural.

Alaska public and environmental health authorities investigated a cluster of campylobacteriosis cases among people who had consumed raw, unpasteurized milk obtained from a cow-share program in Alaska. Although raw milk is not permitted by law to be offered commercially, consumers can enter into cow-share agreements whereby they contribute funds for the upkeep of cows and in turn receive a share of the milk for their personal use. Laboratory testing of stool specimens collected from ill persons and from cows on the farm revealed an indistinguishable strain of Campylobacter. In this outbreak, numerous confirmed and suspected cases were not among cow shareholders; therefore, these individuals had not been advised of the potential health hazards associated with consumption of raw milk nor were they informed of the outbreak developments.

The replacement model compares the present values of expected net returns to the keep and replace decisions for cows differentiated as to length of previous ealvŸ interval, laetation number, and production in prior laetations. Taking obsolescenee explicitly into aecount, all eows are ranked in order of their future pro~tability.

No abstract

The farm price of much of the milk produced in the South has been under government regulation for a long time. Two principal economic criteria have been used as bases for setting minimum producer prices: (1) costs of production in the regulated area, and (2) the costs of obtaining milk from sources outside the area. Which of these criteria was paramount at any particular time and location was related to the effectiveness with which barriers to the inflow of milk could be maintained, and the political power of milk producer groups relative to other interests.