After riding a stagecoach in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show at Madison Square Garden in 1910, Princeton student Irving H. "Larry" Larom was determined to live a life in the West. Later that year, Larom made the first of four summer trips to Wyoming, where he was a guest at Jim McLaughlin's Valley Ranch, nestled in a scenic valley in the upper South Fork of the Shoshone River. Larom became so enamored of the magnificent wilderness environment and the prospects of becoming a dude rancher that he abandoned his life as a New York socialite. Partnering with Brooks Brothers heir and Yale student Winthrop Brooks, he purchased Valley Ranch in 1915.A welcome study of early dude ranch development, Dude Ranching in Yellowstone Country preserves the history of an important Wyoming ranch and the man who built it. W. Hudson Kensel recounts the life of Larom, whose East Coast connections to financial resources and wealthy guests enabled him to transform McLaughlin's small homestead into a major tourist destination and prep school on the edge of Yellowstone National Park. The purchase of Valley Ranch coincided with the opening of Yellowstone to automobile traffic and the onset of World War I. Valley Ranch benefited as western parks and dude ranches became destinations for weary city dwellers and travelers looking for a vacation alternative to war-torn Europe. Besides making the ranch a success, Larom became a civic leader in Cody, Wyoming, a nationally recognized conservationist, and a founder and longtime president of the Dude Ranchers Association. Kensel draws on Larom's papers, local and national newspaper coverage, records of the ranch's prep school, and memories of the citizens and pioneers of northwestern Wyoming to flesh out the story of Valley Ranch as a local and national institution with important influences on conservation, youth education, and the development of western tourism.

This monumental text-reference places in clear persepctive the importance of nutritional assessments to the ecology and biology of ruminants and other nonruminant herbivorous mammals. Now extensively revised and significantly expanded, it reflects the changes and growth in ruminant nutrition and related ecology since 1982. Among the subjects Peter J. Van Soest covers are nutritional constraints, mineral nutrition, rumen fermentation, microbial ecology, utilization of fibrous carbohydrates, application of ruminant precepts to fermentive digestion in nonruminants, as well as taxonomy, evolution, nonruminant competitors, gastrointestinal anatomies, feeding behavior, and problems fo animal size. He also discusses methods of evaluation, nutritive value, physical struture and chemical composition of feeds, forages, and broses, the effects of lignification, and ecology of plant self-protection, in addition to metabolism of energy, protein, lipids, control of feed intake, mathematical models of animal function, digestive flow, and net energy. Van Soest has introduced a number of changes in this edition, including new illustrations and tables. He places nutritional studies in historical context to show not only the effectiveness of nutritional approaches but also why nutrition is of fundamental importance to issues of world conservation. He has extended precepts of ruminant nutritional ecology to such distant adaptations as the giant panda and streamlined conceptual issues in a clearer logical progression, with emphasis on mechanistic causal interrelationships. Peter J. Van Soest is Professor of Animal Nutrition in the Department of Animal Science and the Division of Nutritional Sciences at the New York State College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Cornell University.

Viewers of films and television shows might imagine the dude ranch as something not quite legitimate, a place where city dwellers pretend to be cowboys in amusingly inauthentic fashion. But the tradition of the dude ranch, America's original western vacation, is much more interesting and deeply connected with the culture and history of the American West. In American Dude Ranch, Lynn Downey opens new perspectives on this buckaroo getaway, with all its implications for deciphering the American imagination. Dude ranching began in the 1880s when cattle ranches ruled the West. Men, and a few women, left the comforts of their eastern lives to experience the world of the cowboy. But by the end of the century, the cattleman's West was fading, and many ranchers turned to wrangling dudes instead of livestock. What began as a way for ranching to survive became a new industry, and as the twentieth century progressed, the dude ranch wove its way into American life and culture. Wyoming dude ranches hosted silent picture shoots, superstars such as Gene Autry were featured in dude film plots, fashion designers and companies like Levi Strauss & Co. replicated the films' western styles, and novelists Zane Grey and Mary Roberts Rinehart moved dude ranching into popular literature. Downey follows dude ranching across the years, tracing its influence on everything from clothing to cooking and showing how ranchers adapted to changing times and vacation trends. Her book also offers a rare look at women's place in this story, as they found personal and professional satisfaction in running their own dude ranches. However contested and complicated, western history is one of America's national origin stories that we turn to in times of cultural upheaval. Dude ranches provide a tangible link from the real to the imagined past, and their persistence and popularity demonstrate how significant this link remains. This book tells their story-in all its familiar, eccentric, and often surprising detail.

This collection reviews and summarises the wealth of research on key challenges in developing better data management and decision support systems (DSS) for farmers and examples of how those systems are being deployed to optimise efficiency in crop and livestock production. Part 1 reviews general issues underpinning effective decision support systems (DSS) such as data access, standards, tagging and security. Part 2 contains case studies of the practical application of data management and DSS in areas such as crop planting, nutrition and use of rotations, livestock feed and pasture management as well as optimising supply chains for fresh produce. With its distinguished editor and international team of authors, Improving data management and decision support systems in agriculture will be a standard reference for researchers in agriculture and computer science interested in improving data management, modelling and decision support systems in farming, as well as government and other agencies supporting the use of precision farming techniques, and companies supplying decision support services to the farming sector.