Farm size trends

Because farm size has increased in most developed countries, farmers have switched from bagged fertilizers to bulk or liquid products. This trend is most pronounced in the United States and is illustrated in Figure 3.1. In... 

These trends can be seen particularly well in U.S. statistics by contrasting the number of mixed (crops and livestock) family farms (steadily decreasing) with the number of corporate farms, size of an average operation, and spatial concentration of specialized cropping and animal production (all increasing) see USDA (25). 

Small- and medium-sized farms are interested in the development of small-scale ethanol production facilities (approximately 250,000 gallons per year) as a means of developing additional uses for their crops, and as a means to develop independence from oil suppliers. While, to date, there has been little construction of on-farm units, these farms represent a large potential market if current trends continue. 

As was encountered In our earlier assessment of field crop production of green beans, the data allow only semlquantltatlve evaluations of exposure trends due to the large variation In equipment and practices encountered. This situation Is not unusual when one considers that the small size and mixed cropping practices of the typical farms In this area require that equipment be adaptable to multiple functions. Full data from these studies are contained In our 1982 NEPIAP Report (. ). 

Wind farm availability and completed scheduled maintenance values are shown in Figure 5. Availability values show similar trends to the power production values and increase when the fleet size becomes larger. For all fleet compositions, the availability values are lower for the fleets with CTV-2. The reason is the number of accessible days within a year for CTV-2 is lower than the number of accessible days for CTV-1. Therefore, it will not be possible to reach equivalent productivity by chartering a larger number of CTV-2 s. With regard to completed scheduled maintenance values, it can be seen that scheduled maintenance tasks can be completed within simulation period in both cases however the size of the CTV-2 fleet has to be larger to achieve comparable performance with the CTV-1 fleet. 

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