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Report Introduction: The primary purpose of this report is to make available certain statistical information about motortruck shipments of agricultural commodities into and out of California. Interstate truck transportation of certain agricultural commodities ordinary livestock, poultry, fish, shellfish, and most unprocessed farm products--is exempt from economic regulation by the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) by Section 203 (b) of the Motor Carrier Act of 1935, as amended in 1958. Therefore, no agency, public or private, has the responsibility for assembling economic information on the interstate transportation of exempt commodities. This report relates only to exempt truck shipments in and out of California. All intrastate for-hire carriers, except those hauling agricultural commodities from fields to canneries, packing sheds, or processing plants, are regulated by the State. Although the main emphasis is on truck transportation, selected rail and water data are included for comparative purposes. The basic data used in this report were compiled from a number of secondary sources, the Federal-State Market News Service, and interviews with growers, shippers, truckers, brokers, and tradespeople., U.S. Department of Agriculture/Economic Research Service in Cooperation with the University of California Agricultural Experiment Station/Davis.

Excerpts from the report: The motor-carrier industry is unique among the regulated industries, because the for-hire interstate transportation of unmanufactured agricultural commodities by truck is exempt from economic regulation by section 203(b), subsection 6 of the Motor Carrier Act of 1935, as amended. This section is known as the agricultural exemption, and carriers engaged exclusively in hauling exempt agricultural commodities are known as exempt carriers. This report analyzes the data supplied by special tabulation of the 1963 Census of Transportation. The purpose is finding answers to the following questions: (1) What are the operating characteristics of motor carriers engaged in hauling exempt agricultural commodities? (2) Do these characteristics differ from those of carriers subject to economic regulation? (3) How do the estimates based on smaller samples compare with those based on the Census data?

Excerpts from the report: This study is limited to economic considerations of efficiency in use of resources. It does not take into account political, ethical, or other noneconomic factors which may outweigh economic considerations in policy decisions. The plan of the report is as follows: The first part is a discussion of quality of service and rates in the exempt sector. The second part deals with the performance of the sector. It examines the decisionmaking, cost-rate, rate-distance relationships, and the evidence for "excessive competition." The third part discusses the effects of agricultural exemption on other motor carriers and other modes of transportation and whether these effects appear to have resulted in higher social costs or lower social benefits than would have been achieved without the exemption.

Excerpts from the Introduction: The Federal-State Market News Service and other public and private agencies devote considerable resources to collection information on agricultural marketing and disseminating it through mass media and mimeographed daily and weekly reports. The purpose is to increase the general efficiency of this sector of the economy, encourage orderliness in the flow of goods from producer to consumer, and discourage unfair trade practices which otherwise may develop where marketing knowledge is meagre and poorly distributed. The present study was undertaken to examine in some detail the effectiveness of this service to potato growers in Southern California. Because the relationship of the structure of the business to the need for information was not very well known, attention was given to studying the organization of the industry, the economic channels by which the potatoes move, and who makes what decisions on marketing as well as identifying kinds of information received by growers, how they use it, and what they thought about its effectiveness.

Permanent Global Positioning System (GPS) networks are routinely used for producing improved orbits and monitoring secular tectonic deformation. For these applications, data are transferred to an analysis center each day and routinely processed in 24-hour segments. To use GPS for monitoring volcanic events, which may last only a few hours, real-time or near real- time data processing and subdaily position estimates are valuable. Strategies have been researched for obtaining station coordinates every 15 min using a Kalman filter; these strategies have been tested on data collected by a GPS network on Kilauea Volcano. Data from this network are tracked continuously, recorded every 30 s, and telemetered hourly to the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. A white noise model is heavily impacted by data outages and poor satellite geometry, but a properly constrained random walk model fits the data well. Using a borehole tiltmeter at Kilauea's summit as ground-truth, solutions using different random walk constraints were compared. This study indicates that signals on the order of 5 mm/h are resolvable using a random walk standard deviation of 0.45 cm/ AAA p . Values lower than this suppress small signals, and values greater than this have significantly higher noise at periods of 1-6 hours.