Background: Chongkukjang is a traditional Korean fermented product prepared from soybeans and reported to have multiple biological functions, including antidiabetic, antiinflammatory, and neuroprotective effects. Influenza is a respiratory disease caused by influenza viruses and continues to be a worldwide threat with a high potential to cause pandemics. Besides vaccination, only two classes of…
Background: The flora in Uzbekistan is extremely rich and diverse due to its biogeographical features such as a sharply continental climate, deserts, and high mountains. Methods: The collected data were obtained from the 12 villages of the west (Tashkent region), the southern part of Uzbekistan (Kashkadarya and Surhandarya regions), and Karalpakstan by conducting interviews and through scientif…
In northern Europe a number of fish products are prepared in such a way that biochemical and microbial action can take place. These are complex processes for which there are few available scientific studies. This article covers the origin, manufacturing, characteristics, and consumption of traditional fermented fish products, including surstr€omming from Sweden, rakfisk from Norway, hakarl f…
Kinema, hawaijar, tungrymbai, bekang, aakhone, and peruyaan are naturally fermented ethnic soybean foods of India; they are popular among the Mongolian-origin races in the Eastern Himalayas. Bacillus subtilis is the dominant functional bacterium in all naturally fermented soybean foods of these regions. Although there is a good demand for ethnic fermented soybean foods among local consumers in …
Soybeans are produced in large amounts around the world. In Asian countries, soybeans have been used mostly as a source of food, and inWestern countries, they have been used as animal feed and in non-food products. However, since scientific evidence of the dietary benefits of soybeans has been published, the use of soybeans as a food ingredient has increased. In Asia, soybeans have been used in…
Thua nao is a traditionally fermented food in Thailand. It is manufactured by fermenting cooked soybeans with naturally occurring microbes. There are also similar products including natto in Japan, kinema in India, and chongkukjang in Korea. In Thailand, thua nao is widely consumed, especially by people in the northern part. The product is generally regarded as a protein supplement and widel…
Background: Studies have supported the protective effect of high fruit consumption in the management of chronic diseases such as diabetes. Methods: Thirteen fresh tropical fruits were sourced for and the fruits juices were extracted, freeze dried, and then reconstituted for analysis. The sugar, starch, amylose, and amylopectin contents as well as glycemic indices, antioxidant properties, and th…
In this study, the effects of the application of selected bio-fertilizer and fungicides (Bacillus subtilis, Trichoderma harzianum, Boscalid + Pyraclostrobin,T. harzianum + 1⁄2 Boscalid + Pyraclostrobin, B. subtilis + 1⁄2 Boscalid + Pyraclostrobin) on the quality of Romaine lettuce were investigated. Water, relative water and chlorophyll content, color values, sensory properties and mesophi…
Soy protein isolate (SPI) was hydrolyzed and then its hydrolysate (Hyd-SPI) was supplemented to dough. The dough fermented by a starter consisting of Lactobacillus paralimentarius 412 and Anqi’s yeast was applied to manufacture Chinese steamed bread. Addition of 1% Hyd-SPI to dough is found to significantly improve the farinograph and extensograph values. Moreover, 1% Hyd-SPI stimulates the …
A rapid and semiquantitative lateral flow assay has been developed for detection of cephalexin (CFX) in milk. The assay is based on a competitive format using polyclonal antibodies. Antibodies were raised in rabbits against CFX-keyhole limpet hemocyanin. The specificity of antibodies was ascertained by direct enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. The laboratory prepared gold nanoparticles coupled…
The cryoprotective effects of modified starch–sucrose mixtures on silver carp surimi were compared with commercial cryoprotectant using the changes in gel strength and actomyosin conformation during frozen storage. Acetic acid esterification starch (AAES)-sucrose maintained the maximum gel strength and Ca2+–ATPase activity throughout the frozen storage (P < 0.05). Hydroxypropylated starch (…
The effects of Cephalaria syriaca flour on the quality of sunn pest-damaged wheat were investigated. Sunn pest-damaged wheat was blended into sound wheat at different levels (5, 10 and 15%). C. syriaca flour was then added at 0.5, 1.0 and 1.5% levels. The rheological properties of sunn pest-damaged wheat flour with added C.syriaca flour were considerably improved, in particular with regard to f…
Tractor as one of the most widely used agricultural machinery should be considered from different aspects. The frequent application of clutch and brake pedals and also the steering wheel within farms, along with the unfavorable working conditions, cause negative effects on the occupational health of the tractor drivers. Thus, in this research, the imposed forces on three engaged muscles includi…
The research aims to develop an automatic Question Answering system, in particular Why and How questions, on community web-boards to support ordinary people in preliminary diagnosis and problem solving, such as plant disease problems. The research includes two main problems: Why and How question identification and Why and How answer determination, where Why and How questions are based on expla…
Over the last three decades, China’s agriculture sector has been transformed from the traditional to modern practice through the effective deployment of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Information processing and dissemination have played a critical role in this transformation process. Many studies in relation to agriculture information services have been conducted in China,…
The term ‘‘micronaire” describes an important cotton fiber property by characterizing both the fiber maturity and fineness. In practice, micronaire is regularly measured in laboratories with the well established high volume instrumentation (HVITM) protocol. In most scenarios,cotton breeders/geneticists sent cotton breeding line field trial samples to laboratories equipped to use the HVITM…
Bulk density is an indicator of soil compaction subject to anthropogenic impact, essential to the interpretation of any nutrient budgets, especially to perform carbon inventories. It is so expensive to measure bulk density in arctic/sub-arctic and there are relatively very few field measurements are available. Therefore, to establish a bulk density and SOC empirical relationship in Canada’s a…
This paper introduces a GIS based methodology to generate dynamic process model for the simulation based analysis of a sensitive rural watershed. The Direct Computer Mapping (DCM) based solution starts from GIS layers and, via the graph interpretation and graphical edition of the process network, the expert interface is able to integrate the field experts’knowledge in the computer aided gener…
Labisia pumila (Kacip fatimah) is a popular medicinal plant in Malaysia. The constituents of this plant have been reported to possess anticancer, antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. The growth and production of L. pumila is greatly influenced by the plant water status. Current techniques to measure plant water status are generally based on the plant soil moisture, which apparently did…
Standards to describe soil properties are well established, with many ISO specifications and a few international thesauri available for specific applications. Besides, in recent years, the European directive on ‘‘Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community (INSPIRE)” has brought together most of the existing standards into a well defined model.However, the adoption of…
The behaviour of broiler chickens has been extensively studied as a function of stocking density and environmental conditions, but limited information was reported in the scientific literature about the effect of feeder type on birds’ feeding process. The main objective of this study was to assess the effects of three different feeder types in relation to the birds’behaviour in its surround…
In the present paper, a life cycle assessment (LCA) study regarding barley and lettuce production in Spain (Barrax and Santomera regions) and Italy (Albenga region) in both open field (OF) and standard greenhouse (GH) cultivations was performed in order to evaluate energy consumption and environmental impacts. The study examines also the impact of the use of compost produced from agricultural …
A newcontrolled seed metering unit was designed and mounted on a common grain drill for direct seeding of wheat (DSW). It comprised the following main parts: (a) a variable-rate controlled direct current motor (DCM) as seed metering shaft driver, (b) two digital encoders for sensing the rotational speed of supplemental ground wheel (SGW) and seed metering shaft and (c) a control box to handle a…
Greenness identification from crop images captured outdoors is the important step for crop growth monitoring. The commonly used methods for greenness identification are based on visible spectral-index, such as the excess green index, the excess green minus excess red index, the vegetative index, the color index of vegetation extraction, the combined index. All these visible spectral-index based…
The repeated usage of frying oil has been proven hazardous due to the degradation process by chemical reactions that lead to changes in the quality of the oil. Currently, the degree of frying oil degradation is indicated by the percentage of its total polar compounds (TPC). In this study, a capacitive sensor was designed to assess frying oil degradation at several heating time intervals by meas…
The energy required for tillage processes accounts for a significant proportion of total energy used in crop production. In many tillage processes decreasing the draft and upward vertical forces is often desired for reduced fuel use and improved penetration, respectively. Recent studies have proved that the discrete element modelling (DEM) can effectively be used to model the soil–tool intera…
In the present study a specific approach is followed, considering the Pesticide DRASTIC and Susceptibility index (SI) methods and a GIS framework, to assess groundwater vulnerability in the agricultural area of Albenga, in north Italy. The results indicate ‘‘high’’ to ‘‘very high’’ vulnerability to groundwater contamination along the coastline and the middle part of the Albenga …
Metadata aggregators and service providers harvest entire collections or they restrict harvesting by date or sets. However most often user approach to collections is not by dates or set names but by domain based keywords. Harvesting by domains is an issue when service providers attempt to collect data from multiple sources. The main problem is that harvesters,at present, do not have the facilit…
Drying of turmeric was carried out in a solar conduction dryer (SCD). Drying air temperature was achieved around 39–51 C for an ambient temperature in the range of 25–28 C. Moisture content from 78.65% (wb), was reduced to 6.36% (wb) and 5.50% (wb) for solid and sliced samples respectively in 12 h effective drying time. Drying curve of sliced samples showed more uniform falling in compar…
This paper reports the study of crumb rubber drying in different experimental designs. It is important to understand the characteristics of crumb rubber drying in order to formulate a better drying strategy that could give higher energy efficiency. Four experiments were carried out with constant heat at maximum 100 C and a stainless steel container was used to hold the sample of crumb rubber u…
The Agriculture business domain, as a vital part of the overall supply chain, is expected to highly evolve in the upcoming years via the developments, which are taking place on the side of the Future Internet. This paper presents a novel Business-to-Business collaboration platform from the agri-food sector perspective, which aims to facilitate the collaboration of numerous stakeholders belongin…
Bio-gasification is a new technology and considered as a more efficient way to utilize bioenergy. The economic feasibility becomes one of the greatest issues when we apply this new technology. Evaluation of economic feasibility of a bio-gasification facility needs better understanding of its production unit cost under different capacities and different working shift modes. The objective of this…
A non-parametric method of data envelopment analysis (DEA) was applied to analyze the technical and scale efficiency of potato production in 23 Iranian provinces. In many real applications, inputs and outputs may be imprecise. In the present study, a robust DEA (RDEA) optimization framework was used to concentrate on DEA with uncertain data. The method was based on six inputs (human labor rent…
What makes earthquake risks so catastrophic and dreadful? Possible reasons are attributed to the sudden, unpredictable, involuntary, and large-scale nature of the risks. As a consequence of a devastating earthquake, a tremendous surge of seismic damage and loss may overwhelm the risk-bearing capacities of households, companies, municipalities, and insurers, and may eventually cause serious…
Apart from number and size of machines in a farm, operations scheduling can also affect timeliness costs. In this study a new equation was presented for determination of timeliness costs and it was proven that the new equation is a generalization of the well-known ASABE standard equation. Based on the new equation, a parameter namely,timeliness index was defined that indicates the distribution …
The high nitrite content in edible bird’s nests is a major concern to the local swiftlet industry. It lowers the price of the edible bird’s nests and it brings severe health hazards to consumers and farmers. This research investigated the nitrite and nitrate contents of eight types of local edible bird’s nests by using ion chromatography system and evaluating its colour using the CIE syst…
Recently, underwater vehicles have become low cost, reliable and affordable platforms for performing various underwater tasks. While many aquaculture systems are closed with no harmful output, open net cage fish farms and land-based fish farms can discharge significant amounts of wastewater containing nutrients, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals that impact on the surrounding environment. Althoug…
Time to digital converter (TDC) is a key block for time-gated single photon avalanche diode (SPAD) arrays for Raman spectroscopy that applicable in the agricultural products and food analysis. In this paper a new dual slope time to digital converter that employs the time to voltage conversion and integrating techniques for digitizing the time interval input signals is presented. The reference c…
Information and communications technology has exponentially grown in recent years and has played a significant role in organizational development. The main purpose of this study was to collect the data needed for the introduction of a new tool for assessing e-readiness in the Agricultural Organization of Guilan Province, Iran. The study population includes agricultural organization experts and…
The potential of the visible infrared (Vis–IR) (400–1100 nm) transmittance method to assess the internal quality (freshness) of intact chicken egg during storage at a temperature of 30 ± 7 C and 25 ± 4% relative humidity was investigated. Two hundred chicken egg samples were used for measuring freshness and spectra collection during egg storage (up to 25 days). Two correlation models, fi…
This paper, which aims to increment the vocabulary of an existing thesaurus using hyponymy relations, focuses on an agricultural thesaurus called AGROVOC. Our main goal is to acquire AGROVOC-qualified candidates from the hyponymy relations of legal texts and tables. We propose a pattern-based approach to hyponymy relation acquisition. Our experimental result showed that 222 and 868 candidates a…
In this paper we consider a link-unreliable remote monitoring scenario where the monitoring center is geographically located far away from the region of the deployed sensor network,and sensing data by the sensors in the network will be transferred to the remote monitoring center through a third party telecommunication service. A cost associated with this service will be incurred, which will be…
This paper proposes a supervised classification approach for the real-time pattern recognition of sows in an animal supervision system (asup). Our approach offers the possibility of the foreground subtraction in an asup’s image processing module where there is lack ofstatistical information regarding the . A set of 7 farrowing sessions of sows, during day and night, have been captured (appr…
The article presents an ontology called ‘‘Science’’ designed for representing proved and disproved statements extracted from scientific papers from the database of the ProOptiBeef project. We argue that the proved and disproved statements are the best characterization of the content of the papers they are extracted from. We show that ontological representation of proved and disproved st…
The novel imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA) has presented outstanding fitness on various optimization problems. Application of meta-heuristics has been a dynamic studying interest of the reliability optimization to determine idleness and reliability constituents. The application of a meta-heuristic evolutionary optimization method, imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA), for minimization…
This paper describes the measurement of contact pressure in the context of wheel–terrain interaction as affected by wheel load and tire inflation pressure when fusion of the wavelet transform with the back-propagation (BP) neural network is applied to construct the wavelet neural network contact pressure prediction model. To this aim, a controlled soil bin testing facility equipped with singl…
Shellfish farms are closed for harvest when microbial pollutants are present. Such pollutants are typically present in rainfall runoff from various land uses in catchments. Experts currently use a number of observable parameters (river flow, rainfall, salinity) as proxies to determine when to close farms. We have proposed using the short term historical rainfall data as a time-series prediction…
Canada’s Arctic and sub-arctic consist 46% of Canada’s landmass and contain 45% of the total soil organic carbon (SOC). Pronounced climate warming and increasing human disturbances could induce the release of this SOC to the atmosphere as greenhouse gases. Canada is committed to estimating and reporting the greenhouse gases emissions and removals induced by land use change in the Arctic and…
Energy is regarded as one of the most important elements in agricultural sector. During the last decades energy consumption in agriculture has increased, so finding the relationship between energy consumption and crop yields in agricultural production can help to achieve sustainable agriculture. In this study several adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) models were evaluated to predict…
In the textile industry, it is always the case that cotton products are constitutive of many types of foreign fibers which affect the overall quality of cotton products. As the foundation of the foreign fiber automated inspection, image process exerts a critical impact on the process of foreign fiber identification. This paper presents a new approach for the fast processing of foreign fiber ima…