Master of Agribusiness / Department of Agricultural Economics / Kevin Gwinner / Under the leadership of the Van Eekeren family, Land O’ Frost has become one of the fastest growing meat processing manufacturers in the United States. “Premium” is Land O’ Frost’s flagship brand which makes up 57% of the company’s total sales dollars. Of the line of Premium lunchmeats, Honey Smoked Turkey is ranked #3 in total sales dollars. However, if you rank the product’s performance by dividing its all commodity volume (ACV) by the number of pounds sold, it is ranked #7 out of the nine single pack flavors offered in retail. There has been internal speculation that the Honey Smoked Turkey’s sales performance is related to a lack of honey/sweetness flavor in the lunchmeat. As a result, Land O’ Frost needed to determine if the current level of honey/sweetness flavor of the Honey Smoked Turkey needs to be increased in order to stimulate higher growth in sales. A third party consultant conducted a consumer test between Land O’ Frost’s honey smoked turkey and their top two competitors’ honey smoked turkey. Based on the results, the Land O’ Frost product was the least likely preferred and was rated as having the lowest sweetness flavor profile among the three products. In an effort to develop a sweeter tasting honey turkey, different test formulations were developed using different honeys, levels of honey and sweeteners. The lighter the honey grade the less flavor impact was present in the turkey. As a result, a test formula containing twice the amount of light amber honey and the maximum amount of sugar was developed to be sweeter and to offer better marketing claims to potentially attract more customers. Due to product process differences between the Land O’ Frost’s honey smoked turkey and its competitor’s, the decision was made to conduct another consumer test between the current control and the newly formulated test product. The data determined that there was not a significant difference between the two products tested. A triangle test was conducted via a third party and it also confirmed the same conclusion. With the test formula having a slightly higher cost per pound than the current control formula, it was decided internally that the test formula could replace the current formula if the test formula price per pound can be adjusted to the same cost as the control. I would recommend that the level of sugar in the new test formula be slightly decreased until the formula cost per pound is the same as the control. The cost of meat raw materials used by Land O’ Frost often changes due to market price conditions. The new formulated honey smoked turkey’s selling potential would still have a positive impact by utilizing claims such as “double the honey” and “lower sodium” on the package. In this case, the selling potential increase would be more heavily executed from a marketing perspective than from flavor development.

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1959 R54

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This thesis highlights the fact that the way Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost understood nature informed their work as writers. The underlying theme through each chapter is how epistemology about the natural world is created. It compares two seemingly opposed approaches to knowledge construction about nature, answering the question: Is knowledge and value about nature socially constructed or inherently existent and discovered. The second chapter emphasizes that Dickinson considered knowledge based in nature to be socially constructed, making the subjugation of the nineteenth-century woman one of her central subjects. The third chapter shows how Frost agreed with social constructivism in that knowledge is the product of imaginative involvement; he used a constructive stance to emphasize humanity's important role in compelling nature to reveal spiritual truths, which made the reciprocal relationship between people and their environments central to his work. The concluding chapter synthesizes these two approaches and suggests that both are necessary in our modern day understanding of nature.

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Graduation date: 1991

Graduation date: 1992

<p>The hydrologic cycle may be described in essence as the process of water rising and falling in its various phases between land and atmosphere. In this minimal description of the hydrologic cycle two features come into focus: intermittency and irreversibility. In this dissertation intermittency and irreversibility are investigated broadly in the soil-plant-atmosphere system. The theory of intermittency and irreversibility is addressed here in three ways: (1) through its effect on components of the soil-plant-atmosphere system, (2) through development of a measure of the degree of irreversibility in time-series, and (3) by the investigation of the dynamical sources of this intermittency. First, soil infiltration and spring frost risk are treated as two examples of hydrologic intermittency with very different characters and implications for the soil plant system. An investigation of the water budget in simplified soil moisture models reveals that simple bucket models of infiltration perform well against more accurate representation of intra-storm infiltration dynamics in determining the surface water partitioning. Damaging spring frost is presented as a ``biologically-defined extreme event'' and thus as a more subtle form of hydrologic intermittency. This work represents the first theoretical development of a biologically-defined extreme and highlights the importance of the interplay between daily temperature mean and variance in determining the changes in damaging frost risk in a warming climate. Second, a statistical measure of directionality/asymmetry is developed for stationary time-series based on analogies with the theory of nonequilibrium thermodynamics. This measure is then applied to a set of DNA sequences as an example of a discrete sequence with limited state-space. The DNA sequences are found to be statistically asymmetric and further that the local degree of asymmetry is a reliable indicator of the coding/noncoding status of the DNA segment. Third, the phenomenology of rainfall occurrence is compared with canonical examples of dynamical intermittency to determine whether these simple dynamical features may display a dominant signature in rainfall processes. Summer convective rainfall is found to be broadly consistent with Type-III intermittency. Following on this result we studied daytime atmospheric boundary layer dynamics with a view toward developing simplified models that may further elucidate the interaction the interaction between land surface conditions and convective rainfall triggering.</p> / Dissertation