All posts by Daniel Sandars

The purpose of Daniel Sandars' current work is to inform UK policy on biodiversity and arable agriculture by providing decision analysis methods and related quantified evidence base. The aim is to identify, develop as necessary, and apply methods which develop the linear programming approach to agricultural production planning to include effects on exemplar indicator species of farmland birds and mammals together with the associated decision making behaviour of farmers. The resulting approach will identify and quantify how farmers respond to changes in the financial, regulatory, climatic and technological environment, especially with respect to initiatives to promote biodiversity. It will be capable of rapid recalculation and easy adaptation to evaluate future, as yet unspecified, choices and changes. In general he applies a variety of modelling and operational research techniques, which often require considerable methodological innovation to succeed (be fit for purpose).
current affairs

Some Good News About Food – NYTimes.com

Food: Six Things to Feel Good About

By MARK BITTMAN

Mark Bittman on food and all things related.

Tags:

farming, food safety, school lunches, urban agriculture

The great American writer, thinker and farmer Wendell Berry recently said, “You can’t be a critic by simply being a griper . . . One has also to . . . search out the examples of good work.”

I’ve griped for weeks, and no doubt I’ll get back to it, but there are bright spots on our food landscape, hopeful trends, even movements, of which we can be proud. Here are six examples.

1)  Not just awareness, but power | Everyone talks about food policy, but as advocates of change become more politically potent we’re finally seeing more done about it.

2) Moving beyond greenwashing | Michelle Obama’s recent alliance with Wal-Mart made even more headlines than the retailer’s plan to re-regionalize its food distribution network, which is if anything more significant.

3) Real food is spreading | There are now more than 6,000 farmers markets nationwide — about a 250 percent increase since 1994 (significant: there are half as many as there are domestic McDonald’s), and 900 of them are open during the winter.

4) We’re not just buying, we’re growing | Urban agriculture is on the rise. If you’re smirking, let me remind you that in 1943, 20 million households (three-fifths of the population at that point) grew more than 40 percent of all the vegetables we ate.

5)  Farming is becoming hip | The number of farms is at last increasing, although it’s no secret that farmers are an endangered species: the average age of the principal operator on farms in the United States is 57.

6)  The edible school lunch | The school lunch may have more potential positive influences than anything else, and we’re beginning to see it realized.

via Some Good News About Food – NYTimes.com.

Special Interest Groups

Method: extinction of social groups (such as agricultural OR)

Interesting article on social group dynamics using a non-linear dynamics model. The interesting thing is can the para,meters be managed to prevent small groups fading away.  Is there a critical mass?

Nonlinear dynamics is invoked to explain a wide range of physical phenomena in which a number of factors play a part.

One of the team, Daniel Abrams of Northwestern University, put forth a similar model in 2003 to put a numerical basis behind the decline of lesser-spoken world languages.

At its heart is the competition between speakers of different languages, and the “utility” of speaking one instead of another.

“The idea is pretty simple,” said Richard Wiener of the Research Corporation for Science Advancement.

“It posits that social groups that have more members are going to be more attractive to join, and it posits that social groups have a social status or utility,” he told BBC News.

via BBC News – Religion may become extinct in nine nations, study says.

Inspiring ideas

OR 4 Conservation

Dr Siwan lovett gave a talk to Cranfield University about the foundation of Australia’s first Rver Restoration Centre (ARRC) http://www.arrc.com.au

They key is the empowerment of local communities to take care of their Riparian habitats and to develop the capacity for local communities to exercise that power. It was important to identify and give voice to all stakeholders, espcially those that don’t have power, such as aboriginies. This sounded good territory for soft OR: Problem Structuring Methods, Soft Systems Methodology and Multi-Criteria Decision Making methods.

There are questions about some tools concerning anthropocentrism and mechanistic additivity.  In the first case we neglect that species are worth conserving regardless of mankind’s value of them.  In the second case we can neglect the fact that viable ecosystems are worth more than the sum of their parts.

A fascinating challenge is that of applied multi-disciplinary science in an academic setting.  Can the centre both deliver sustainable change at a community level as well as generate high impact research hits, which are the standard measure of academic excellence.

The communication of science will be key to their success. Some scientists are good at this and should be encouraged, but on other occassions it takes someone else. An example of the resistance to anyting ‘not invented here’ crops up with each stakeholder requiring the same information, but presented in their own style, e.g. sheep farmers will not accept litreature prepared for dairy farmers.

current affairs

Interdisciplinarity

RELU LOGO

I recently had call to put forward my views on interdisciplinarity and OR. My current funding comes from a programme that aims to create an interdisciplinary synthesis between natural and social scientists to solve problems relating to sustainable rural development.

I am now increasingly of the view that social scientists are arrogant, natural scientists are ignorant, and both need bombing out of their ivory towers if interdisciplinarity is to have a chance. To understand why see http://www.relu.ac.uk/research/Discussions%20on%20interdisciplinarity.html and the article on Operational Research.

I’d be interested if anyone else has formed opinions one way or another. It would be instructive to share them. email daniel

Recently I discovered that one OR professional did become an interdisciplinarian. He was Baron Solly Zuckerman, a South African, the chief scientific advisor to the British Government (1964 to 1971). One thing he did was to challenge the efficacy of monodisciplinary academia to serve policy. He is credited with introducing science into policy making in Western European Government see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solly_Zuckerman. Also see him mentioned as part of the early history of OR with respect to South Africa http://www.orssa.org.za/wiki/pmwiki.php?n=AboutTheSociety.EarlyHistory

current affairs

Food prices rises are farmers’ boon

Food prices rises are farmers’ boon

Wheat
By Jonty Bloom
BBC News, South Wales

Deep in the Pembrokeshire national park, down long green lanes, Lawrenny Farm lies basking in the sun, amid sleepy fields.
It is a mixed farm, with 10,000 acres of dairy, beef and arable. Owen Lort-Phillips’ family has been farming here for 500 years and it looks and sounds like nothing has changed in half a millennium.

The rise in wheat prices has gladdened farmers’ hearts

But things are changing at Lawrenny. Owen has turned his mixed farm organic – a long and expensive process, even with massive EU subsidies, but the rewards are obvious.

More

The cost of food: Facts and figures

Explore the facts and figures behind the rising price of food across the globe.

More

current affairs

Time to leave the comfort zone

Time to leave the comfort zone

VIEWPOINT
Sir John Sorrell

There are precious few examples of cities that are attempting to reduce energy and resource consumption and improve the quality of life for their citizens, says Sir John Sorrell. But nothing is going to happen, he argues, until politicians accept that they have a mandate to make the tough choices needed.

More

Begging for more than small change

VIEWPOINT
Tom Crompton
Small changes to the way we live our lives are not enough to tackle the environmental challenges facing the planet, argues Tom Crompton. In this week’s Green Room, he says the stark reality is that the only option is to cut the unsustainable consumption of the Earth’s finite resources.

More

current affairs, EURO-Working Group ORAFM, SIG Agriculture & Natural Resources

OR 4 Sustainability?

    Sustainability! Cometh the hour, cometh the Operational Researcher?

Daniel L. Sandars, Ian Frommer, Carlos R. García-Alonso, & Lluis Plà

OR50 is a landmark conference. During WWII many professionals and academics, from multiple disciplines, where hurled together to work on the problems of war. Out of the multi-disciplinary soup came interdisciplinary creativity. A new discipline was born. Its name was Operational Research.

Today, the problems faced by society from unsustainable economic development, such as climate change, have been described as a greater threat than anything we have faced in living memory.

Due believe the sustainability will have a profund influence on OR (or vice versa)

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1) We have come along way since the word sustainability first started doing the rounds. At first it was uncomfortably hard to use, but since then we have all operationalised it to mean what is convenient. It now means everything and thus nothing. What does it need to mean to work?

2) One argument put forward by economists is that it is cheaper to react when the threat is upon us, if at all, because by then we will be smarter and richer. After all, the OR profession rose to the challenge of WWII without long-term strategic capacity building research. Shall we join our funders and sit back and wait?

3) In any case it is all the fault of OR and its narrow pursuit of profit maximisation. What we need is a new interdisciplinary decision science built around morality and social choice. Is it Evolution or Revolution that we need?

4) Ecosystems are dynamic and non-steady state, but economist’s favoured planning models are static. Ecosystems are highly spatially heterogeneous, but planning models are highly homogenous. Never the twain shall meet?

An additional contribution for Ian (OR4Green)
1. Green Fad?
The Energy Crisis of the 1970s led to changes in behavior (smaller, more fuel efficient cars became more prevalent) and funding for alternative energy, energy efficiency, and the like increased. Over time, interest and investment in these responses waned as fuel prices settled down, only to re-emerge recently. Will the current crisis exhibit the same short-term impact only to fade in time, or will it be more lasting?

2. The Short-Term Versus the Long Term
Is it better to change all of our light bulbs today to CFCs to save electricity but increase the amount of mercury in our land-fills, or should we wait until LEDs, which are as energy efficient but lack mercury, become more affordable and wide-spread? Was corn-based ethanol for fuel a huge mistake? Many believe it can at best only make a small contribution to fuel needs, while negatively impacting food supplies and prices, and that it may require more energy to produce than it yields.

3. Quantifying Green
Given two options for completing a task, comparing their monetary costs may be straightforward, but comparing their environmental “friendliness” can be much more difficult. How can the subjectivity of energy/environmental choices be quantified in a way that allows ranking?

4. A Page from Dr. Chapman’s Book
Suppose that in the absence of any human-made impacts, and due entirely to natural processes well beyond our control, it turns out that the Earth’s mean temperature will drop 50 degrees over the next 200 years. What should we do to counter this? What should we do about global warming gases that we are currently emitting? (See for example, the comments of Australian physicist and former astronaut Dr. Phil Chapman.)

Use the commenting option below to express your opinions. Comments will be delayed whilst they are moderated for SPAM.

current affairs, EURO-Working Group ORAFM, General OR, SIG Agriculture & Natural Resources

W(h)ither strategic applied OR?

The fate of strategic applied OR; W(h)ither Agriculture, Horticulture, Forestry, Fisheries, etc! Or w(h)ither not?

Lluis Plà, & Daniel L Sandars, Javier Faulin

There is long term economic decline in the biotic primary production industries as sources of employment and thus students. Globalisation adds its toll as the food chain concentrates into control by few multi-national companies. Long-term capacity building research investments are out of fashion in many national governments.

Do you believe this scenario is realistic

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Given this scenario do you believe it has important implications for the OR community

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1) Through farmers and fishermen society access many increasingly scarce ecosystems services, such as bio-diversity and clean water. Society doesn’t expect to pay so OR will not pay?
2) World population might yet hit 9 billion with many of our lives. For the first time in a generation food security has been thrown into question in the developed world. Are we back in business?
3) In the absence of a strong strategic governmental lead can the large companies with their vast data and financial resource take up the slack? That’ll never work, beyond some short term-tactical profit-maximising studies, with no regard to societal interests? Perhaps consumers and farmers will be king!
4) It maybe that it is supra-national organisations such as multi-nationals, the FAO or the EC to take the lead? That’ll never work because agriculture is so spatially heterogeneous and needs local knowledge?
5) When the last agricultural student has left university we will simply get applied biologists and mathematicians to collaborate. Rubbish! Multi-disciplinary collaboration does not lead to good interdisciplinary science?
6) Are e-tools and open-access journals the answer to maintaining critical mass and vitality in an increasingly sparse profession without the support of dedicated university departments and research establishments?

Use the comment option to express your views. There will be a delay as comments will be moderated for Spam before publication.

current affairs

Meat in a low-carbon world

 

By Tom Heap
Costing the Earth, Radio 4

Cow in field
Cows consume 8kg of grain for 1kg of meat

Feel-good food just got tricky.

It was easy when “good” meant anything which could have stepped off a John Constable canvas: free range chicken, foraging pigs and grazing cattle.

But then climate change came along. No one noticed at first, still concentrating their fire on the obvious targets like 4x4s, long flights and coal power stations; but our meaty diet is laden with greenhouse gases, and trying to reduce them throws up some unpalatable choices.

Read More at the BBC