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Because of the pollution associated with pig manure, pig farmers are being encouraged to adopt environmentally friendly manure management solutions such as biogas digesters. However, as the correlations and influencing factors associated with the different manure disposal stages remain unclear, these solutions have failed to positively change farmer disposal behaviors. Therefore, this paper constructed a triple-hurdle model to empirically analyze the pig farmer manure disposal behaviors and the associated relationships under the belief that the three stage biogas digester decisions were driven by structurally different processes. This paper adds to the literature in three ways (1) it provides a dynamic framework that identifies pig farmer manure disposal behaviors; (2) it applies a recently developed econometric method that corrects for conditional correlations between error terms; and (3) proves that certain factors might have opposite impacts in different behavior stages. It was found that cultivated land area and farm income ratio had statistically significant positive impacts on biogas digesters construction behavior but a negative influence on the farmers' use of the biogas digesters. Farmers who joined a cooperative were found to be statistically more likely to be biogas digester users, and the unconditional expected share of the actual treated manure was significantly higher. This study can assist policymakers in formulating and implementing strategies to encourage greater biogas digestor use by pig farmers.Potential economic and environmental benefits of increasing nitrogen-use efficiency (NUE) are widely recognized but scarcely quantified. This study quantifies the effects of increased NUE on 1) the national agricultural economy using a simulation model of US agriculture and 2) regional water quality effects using a biogeochemical model for the Arkansas-White-Red river basin. National economic effects are reported for NUE improvement scenarios of 10%, 20%, 50%, and 100%, whereas regional water quality effects are estimated for a 20% NUE improvement scenario in the Arkansas-White-Red river basin. Simulating a 20% increase in NUE in row crops is shown to reduce N requirements by 1.4 million tonnes y-1 and increase farmer net profits by 1.6% ($743 million) per year by 2026 over the baseline simulation for the same period. For each 10% increase in NUE, annual farm revenues for commodity crops increased over the baseline by approximately $350 million per year by 2026. Changes in crop prices and land-use relative to the baseline were less than 2%. This suggests a net benefit even though fertilizer cost savings can result in increased cultivation of land, i.e., 'Jevon's paradox'. Results from the biogeochemical model of the Arkansas-White-Red river basin suggest that a 20% increase in NUE corresponds to a 5.72% reduction in nitrate loadings to freshwaters, with higher reductions in agricultural watersheds. The value of these reductions was estimated as $43 ha-1, for a total of $15.3 to 136.7 million yr-1 in avoided water treatment costs. After estimating the social value of increased NUE, we conclude with a discussion of potential strategies to increase efficiency and the research needed to achieve this goal. These include perennialization of the agricultural landscape, genetic crop improvement, targeted fertilizer application, and manipulation of the plant-root microbiome.This study discusses the environmental life cycle impacts of potato and tomato supply chains in a "cradle-to-grave" perspective. The principal focus is to evaluate the processed products, while fresh products are also briefly discussed. Processed products included are potato-chips, frozen fries and dehydrated flakes, and tomato-pasta sauce. The functional unit (FU) is 1 kg product(s), eaten at the consumer stage. Life cycle assessment (LCA) modeling has utilized multiple mechanistic crop models to estimate the crop yields, crop nutrient uptakes and irrigation water requirements. The farming systems represent the primary crop reporting districts where the selected crops are produced on a commercial scale in the United States. The post-harvest system was constructed utilizing the data collected from a processing plant and from other available studies. Caspase inhibitor in vivo LCA modeling also constituted handling of co-products (e.g. starch in potatoes) and biowaste. A wide range of environmental impact categories were selected for the evaluation, which showed environmental differences between fresh and processed products. For instance, global warming potential for potato-fresh, chips, fries and dehydrated was 0.97, 0.85, 1.21 and 0.65 kg CO2-eq/FU respectively. For fresh tomato and tomato sauce, it was 0.74 and 1.5 kg CO2-eq/FU respectively. Likewise, fossil resource scarcity for fresh potatoes was higher than chips and dehydrated flakes, but lower than fries. Water consumption was slightly higher in fresh potatoes compared to the processed products. Similar impact patterns were found in fresh and processed tomato products. For most of the impact categories, processing and the agriculture systems were the major contributors. The contribution from the consumer stage varied with the ways the product is prepared, e.g. whether fries are oven heated or deep-fried in oil. Environmental mitigation measures include, the use of drip irrigation (for potatoes), and reducing food miles, food waste and the use of secondary packaging materials.A study on the published historic data of the residential radon concentration was carried out in order to provide a systematic retrospect and the confluent analysis of the investigations from 1980 to 2019 in China. A new database was established by collecting the results of nearly all radon surveys reported in China. A total of 129 surveys on residential radon, covering 147 cities with the sampling size of 72,295 were collected into the data pool for secondary analysis. The results from different decades confirmed the rapid increase trend of residential radon concentration in China. The geographical coverage, the sampling density and the geographic distribution of sampling sites of these surveys were discussed. The analysis on the local data sequences indicated the average increasing rate of residential radon concentration for 28 Chinese cities was estimated to be 0.80 Bq·m-3·a-1 in last 40 years. The results in this study provided the overall expression of the radon investigations in China and were expected to be benefit to the radon-related studies in the future.