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.J. Crosetti was the founder of the J.J. Crosetti lettuce growing company in the Pajaro Valley, California, which is still in operation today under his son, J.J. Crosetti, Jr. Crosetti began his career in California agriculture as a contract buyer for the T.J. Horgan Company during the late 1920s and early 1930s, and then worked as a buyer for A. Levy and Sentner Distributors in San Francisco. In 1936 Crosetti founded his own company, growing and shipping lettuce, tomatoes, broccoli, apples and other crops primarily in the Pajaro Valley, but also in Arizona and the Imperial Valley of California. Crosetti describes labor operations and packing and shipping methods, including the details of the development of vacuum cooling. He discusses the Bracero Program and ethnic changes in the agricultural labor force from the 1930s to the 1970s. He describes the development of labor organizing in Central California and his own involvement in union contract negotiations. Crosetti was also active in the Grower Shipper Vegetable Association of Central California for many years, and served on the State Board of Agriculture as an appointee of Governor Edmund G. Brown from 1962-1969. He concludes the volume with a discussion of economic and technological changes in California agriculture and the increasing trend away from family farmers towards conglomerates.

.J. Crosetti was the founder of the J.J. Crosetti lettuce growing company in the Pajaro Valley, California, which is still in operation today under his son, J.J. Crosetti, Jr. Crosetti began his career in California agriculture as a contract buyer for the T.J. Horgan Company during the late 1920s and early 1930s, and then worked as a buyer for A. Levy and Sentner Distributors in San Francisco. In 1936 Crosetti founded his own company, growing and shipping lettuce, tomatoes, broccoli, apples and other crops primarily in the Pajaro Valley, but also in Arizona and the Imperial Valley of California. Crosetti describes labor operations and packing and shipping methods, including the details of the development of vacuum cooling. He discusses the Bracero Program and ethnic changes in the agricultural labor force from the 1930s to the 1970s. He describes the development of labor organizing in Central California and his own involvement in union contract negotiations. Crosetti was also active in the Grower Shipper Vegetable Association of Central California for many years, and served on the State Board of Agriculture as an appointee of Governor Edmund G. Brown from 1962-1969. He concludes the volume with a discussion of economic and technological changes in California agriculture and the increasing trend away from family farmers towards conglomerates.

Rapid prototyping (RP) is an emerging technology for creating physical prototypes from three-dimensional computer aided design models by using the additive process with layers. The loading multiple parts into the building space of RP machines, which is a packing optimization problem, is considered as the most important factor to maximize the utilization of space in the building cylinder and reduce building time. To obtain optimized packing result, a genetic algorithm (GA) is developed and implemented. In this paper, chromosomes consist of two segments: one represent the sequence of parts packing by transposition expression, the other represent the rotation mode of parts. This paper will detail the development of a specific algorithm to solve the conversion between the scanning sequence and part layout in two-dimension packing and three-dimension packing of RP processes. Experiments show that the building space is to be used more productively by this packing method for multiple parts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with the optimization problem of packing identical spheres into a rectangular parallelepiped of minimal height. A mathematical model of the problem is constructed and its peculiarities are considered. On the ground of the peculiarities a solution strategy is offered. The strategy includes a special search tree construction, a modification of the Zoutendijk method of feasible directions to calculate local minima, and a modification of the decremental neighborhood method to search for an approximation to the global minimum. Numerical examples and performance analysis of solutions are given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper Fekete and Schepers΄ exact algorithm for the non-guillotinable two-dimensional orthogonal packing problem is discussed. A modification to this algorithm is also proposed. The Fekete and Schepers΄ algorithm relies on a graph representation of packing patterns to assess if there is a feasible packing for a problem. Yet, the algorithm΄s projection graphs construction mechanism sometimes degenerates and while it correctly assesses the existence of a feasible packing pattern, the resulting projection graphs are not equal to the graphs of the packing class to which the packing pattern belongs [1] [2]. The presented algorithm overcomes this problem by introducing an extra condition to avoid the aforementioned degeneration. This modification was tested over instances of previously published literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coffee commodity chains serve as a bidirectional link between producers and consumers worldwide, and they also interconnect local processes and those taking place in overseas markets. Historically, there has been an extraordinary diversity in the ways in which cultivation, harvesting, transport, processing, and export of coffee have been organized. Consumption patterns and especially consumer preferences have changed over time in ways that need to be taken into account but whose effect on coffee producers throughout the tropical world varies considerably in accordance with local situations and dynamics. Coffee farmers' responses to changing external conditions have been far from uniform, and cannot be explained merely as passive reflections of world market trends and fluctuations. This chapter uses the development of Costa Rican coffee production and commercialization, together with brief references to other cases, as a starting point for comparative discussion of interactions between local agroecological, economic, and social conditions, on the one hand, and changes in the international market for this product, on the other. Special attention is paid to the process by which producers of a given country – in this case Costa Rica – come to produce coffee with certain specific attributes that consumers abroad appreciate and for which they are willing to pay. The Costa Rican coffee commodity chain is compared, in passing, to other ones where “high-quality” coffee is produced and subsequently traded under various arrangements, but with substantial – though, of course, variable – smallholder participation at least in cultivation and sometimes in processing and/or transportation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction Coffee production on Réunion (Bourbon), a small island near Madagascar off the coast of Africa, was significant in the eighteenth century, but declined rapidly thereafter. Réunion Creoles then carried the coffee frontier to Madagascar, conquered by France in 1895. Colonial policies made coffee the major Malagasy export by the 1930s and, inadvertently, promoted indigenous smallholder production. The subsequent battle over resources between Réunion Creoles and their Malagasy competitors on the East Coast was a major cause of the 1947 uprising, one of the most bloody episodes in French colonial history. The revolt effectively squeezed small Creole planters out of coffee, leaving a handful of large metropolitan French concerns and numerous small indigenous cultivators. The 1972 revolution led to the demise of large French companies and ushered in a period of mismanaged nationalization that undermined the entire economy, including the coffee sector. Réunion, 1711–1895 Wild Mauritiana coffee was discovered, growing at an altitude of over 600 meters, near St. Paul on Réunion in 1711. Popularly termed “café marron,” it was said that “the most subtle connoisseurs can in no way distinguish [it] … from Mocha coffee.” From 1720, English and Dutch ships purchased Mauritiana coffee, and it was well received in France in 1721. However, Mauritiana prospered only at high altitude and was pronounced less smooth, less perfumed, and more bitter than Mocha, favored by the French East India Company, which governed Réunion from 1708 to 1758. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of coffee too often reify the international market. It is seen as an exogenous force that imposes itself on local producers who are powerless to do anything but obey its dictates. The “law of supply and demand” is seen as a structural dictator. There has been a substantial debate on the extent to which changes have been occasioned by changes in production processes (the creation of surplus) or in demand induced by changing consumption patterns or caused by commercial intermediaries. Who in the commodity chain is in control of prices, and has this changed over the centuries? A second issue, which may appear only a technical subsidiary of the first two but is in fact central, is the creation of international standards and grades. How homogeneous is the commodity and how uniform internationally are the definitions? Do people mean the same thing when they say “coffee”? This chapter analyzes the transformation of coffee from Arab monopoly to European colonial product to the sustenance of Latin American national states to, finally, a globally produced multinational commodity by asking the following questions: (1) What was the relative importance of changing patterns of demand and production in transforming the market, or, to put it another way, what were the relative roles of culture and technology in driving change? (2) What were the relative roles of private and public actors in creating the market? (3) What forces drove standardization, grading, and other market conventions? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]