Meyer, Mary H. (author), Needham, Douglas (author), Dole, John (author), Trader, Brain (author), Fox, Jennifer (author), Conley, Marnie (author), Neff, Michael (author), and Shaw, Jean (author)
Format:
Journal article
Publication Date:
2016-04
Published:
USA: American Society for Horticultural Science
Location:
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 208 Document Number: D13262
7 pages, The American Society for Horticultural Science (Alexandria, VA) and Longwood Gardens (Kennett Square, PA) engaged FleishmanHillard (FH, Washington, DC), a nationally recognized communications and marketing firm, to conduct research with internal and external audiences to determine the public perception of horticulture and careers in horticulture. Through stakeholder focus groups and general public online and phone surveys, the importance of horticulture, career perceptions, and the need for the promotion of horticulture were examined. Students, faculty, industry, and administrators in horticulture have a broad understanding of the field, much more than the public, especially young, ethnically diverse, and lower income participants. Although lack of public awareness is one of the biggest challenges in horticulture, it is also its greatest opportunity. Sixty-five percent of all phone survey participants as compared with 41% of 18–24 years old revealed a general awareness of the word horticulture. General public found agreement (48% to 59%) with four statements about the essential, universal, and invaluable worth of horticulture; however, strong agreement was less, ranging from 26% to 46%. Only 26% of respondents felt strong agreement with the statement, “Horticulture is a diverse area of study, and it offers viable, fulfilling, and respected career paths that I would recommend to others.” The research found strong stakeholder support for a national promotion of horticulture.
15 pages, The current study applied a “mixture-amount modeling” statistical approach—used most often in biology, agriculture, and food science—to measure the impact of advertising effort and allocation across different media. The authors of the current paper believe advertisers can use the mixture-amount model to detect optimal advertising-mix allocation changes as a function of their total advertising effort. The researchers demonstrated the use of the model by analyzing Belgian magazine and television data on 34 advertising campaigns for beauty-care brands. The goal is to help advertisers maximize desirable outcomes for campaign recognition and brand interest.
7 pages., Via online journal., A simmering crisis in the Nigerian agriculture today involves labour and the crisis manifests itself in the degree of labour availability, labour demand and labour productivity. One of the major products of this crisis is the increased participation of children in paid, non-familiar agricultural jobs. They are frequently employed as farm labourers, bird scarers, food crop harvesters, processors and hawkers. More than 132 million children work in agriculture. Agriculture ranks as one of the three most dangerous work activities, followed by mining and construction. Child labour is increasing in postharvest processing, transport, marketing and a range of agroindustries. Child labour is maybe one of the most striking indicators identifying vulnerable children and as such pointing to shortcomings in several of the millennium goals as poverty eradication, education for all, gender equality, combating HIV/AIDS and creation of a global partnership for development. Most working children do so after a decision in their parental household. To understand the household labour supply decisions, relation to the labour market and to public interventions is critical in designing programmes in order to achieve the MDGs. The research on child labour represents in this respect a largely untapped resource of knowledge for policymakers in the fields of agriculture, education programmes and poverty reduction programmes. The effect of lack of education opportunities on child labour is well documented, but existence of widespread agricultural child labour also reduces the effectiveness of investment in education. It is recommended in this paper that the legislator should enact laws that will reduce agricultural child labour through redistribution of the nation’s resources, women should be integrated in the fight to combat child labour and that alternative income sources should be provided for rural families whose children are the most vulnerable.
