The work presented here was conducted as part of an EU-funded five year project investigating pathogens in the food chain, called "Control and prevention of emerging and future pathogens at cellular and molecular level throughout the food chain". Using a questionnaire, research was carried out...

UK Government departments are required to undertake a Regulatory Impact Assessment (RIA) when introducing any policy change that places a burden on businesses, charities, the voluntary sector or individuals. Part of this assessment involves the appraisal of the costs (and benefits) associated...

Traditional regulation in the food safety domain has been in the form of mandatory, inflexible food safety controls that are applied to firms. There has been a trend away from this regulatory paradigm towards more co-regulation and self-regulation by industry. This paper investigates the...

Technical efficiency, the ratio of physical inputs to outputs, is a popular means of assessing agricultural performance. Benchmarking of these efficiencies is a fundamental tool for the farming industry. More sophisticated techniques have been developed recently which offer a greater degree of...

Since decoupling of the CAP, many Scottish suckler cow farms are facing financial difficulties. In response, many farmers are out-wintering extensively managed suckler cows to minimise production costs. These systems are of animal welfare concern. A range of trade-offs between animal welfare...

Environmental management systems [EMS] are now a well established management tool in the ‘greening’ of industry. There is a large body of literature on methodological procedures and application strategies for implementing EMS. Associated with this proliferation of ‘how to’ manuals has...

Territorialisation of rural policies requires moving from a sectoral approach to service provision, and policies that focus exclusively on health and education, for example, to an understanding of overall service provision and quality, differentiated by rural area definition, not primarily by...

Two papers published in peer-reviewed journals (Holt, 2006; Holt et al., 2006) describe the mathematical basis of the UK Non-Native Organism Risk Assessment Scheme2. The current risk assessment methodology (specifically including the proposed scoring system and the categorization of responses) has...

We introduce a new model for examining the dynamics of uptake of technological innovations in agricultural systems, using the adoption of zero-till wheat in the rice-wheat system in Haryana state, India, as a case study. A new equation is derived which describes the dynamics of adoption over...