Valuing Cattle Manure as an Agricultural Resource for Efficiency and Environmental Sustainability

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

check the attached file 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Also, there are a few minor formatting issues that I will be happy to address with a little help. The mdpi Word format includes some things I'm not familiar with, and I was concerned about messing up the whole document. Also, I've inserted a couple of comments regarding these specific places where the formatting probably needs to be addressed. 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Valuing Cattle Manure as an Agricultural Resource for Efficiency and Environmental Sustainability

Sustainability-1263674

This study describes the factors that affect or relate to farmer perceptions of manure’s value. This is well though analyses about the value of cattle manure as agriculture and environmentally sustainable resource.

1. Please add more literature in the introduction section to clearly demonstrate the need of and innovative aspect of the study with up to date literature review and references.
2. Data analysis in not sufficiently described. Based on the current description it is difficult to judge whether statistics is correct?
3. Please add the details about the regression analysis, it is difficult to understand how it was carried out from the current text.
4. How did you deal with outliers since the significant proportion of the data was outliers?
5. I am not expert in statistics but if data is non-linear/non-uniform or very badly skewed then rank order correlation might be more accurate one.
6. Very difficult to follow fig. 1 what is the difference between right and left figure? Do both figures explain for instance wind erosion or past experience etc. Please clarify it.
7. Difficult to understand table 3 and 4. Table 3 has too much information and it is difficult to follow. In Table 4. it seems opposite information is presented than what explained in the text.
8. I would suggest to explain and present at first only the most important factors of the manure management (its environmental and fertilizer value in the table and figure) according to the farmers. The least important can be explained in the later with less focus.
9. In the current arrangement it is difficult to understand which are the most important and the least important one.
10. Please add the discussion in result section
11. Conclusion section should be stand alone.

Author Response

Please see the attachment. 

There are still some relatively minor formatting issues, and because this MDPI format is new to me, I was concerned about messing up the document. Hopefully I can get some help with this, or some suggestions how to fix those things. 

Thank you for your valuable review. 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

the MS is very well written and presented in all sections. I have only one concern on the argument that high knowledge level promoted lower ranking of manure value (as stated in pg 17 lines 717_721) mainly pegged on the issues of legume crediting. This would mean the more knowlegeable farmers are the less the manure will be valued. The general understanding in science is that the two, manure and legumes may play same roles but  manure might have more benefits than the legumes (e.g improvement of bio-physical soil properties ). I will advice the authors to think over this.

Author Response

Please see attachment. 

I appreciate your review and have tried to address the issues you identified. 

I was not familiar with the mdpi Word formatting, so there a few relatively minor formating issues. I could use some help with these, or I can delve deeper into them in order to resolve. I have use comments in the Word document to identify this issue. 

Thanks very much for your insights. 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

I am still not convinced with the presentation of the paper. The objectives and conclusion are not well aligned. The authors could have improved. Please see some specific comments (highlighted)  in the attached pdf. 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors significantly addressed my previous concerns. So it is accepted