Worldwide consumers increasingly demand traditional/local products, to which those made from ewe’s milk belong. In Slovakia, dairy products made from ewe’s milk have a long tradition. A total of ...seventeen farmhouse fresh ewe’s milk lump cheeses from various local farm producers in central Slovakia were sampled at farms and then analyzed. Based on the sequencing data analysis, the phylum Firmicutes dominated (60.92%) in ewe’s lump cheeses, followed with the phylum Proteobacteria (38.23%), Actinobacteria (0.38%) and Bacteroidetes (0.35%). The phylum Firmicutes was represented by six genera, among which the highest amount possessed the genus Streptococcus (41.13%) followed with the genus Lactococcus (8.54%), Fructobacillus (3.91%), Enterococcus (3.18%), Staphylococcus (1.80%) and the genus Brochotrix (0.08%). The phylum Proteobacteria in ewe’s lump cheeses involved eight Gram-negative genera: Pseudomonas, Acinetobacter, Enterobacter, Ewingella, Escherichia-Shigella, Pantoea and Moraxella. The phylum Bacteroidetes involved three genera: Bacteroides, Sphingobacterium and Chrysobacterium. Results presented are original; the microbiome of Slovak ewe’s milk lump cheese has been not analyzed at those taxonomic levels up to now.
The current research aims at exploring the relationships between historical agricultural landscapes and sustainable tourism, by combining the potential of aerial and ground observation methods, that ...are able to detect the seasonal landscape changes. These phenomena are strongly interlaced with the annual cycle of plants, which have many implications for ecological processes, agriculture, health, tourism, regional/urban planning and economy. In many countries, similar phenomena as the timing of spring-blooming or the timing of autumn coloring foliage are of great visual value and can be of touristic interest, so to enhance the overall attractiveness of a territory. The research analyzes the case study of the historical agricultural landscape, localized in the in-between territories Turin and Milan, which is characterized by large portions of paddy-rice fields, which assume different aesthetical configurations over the year. This landscape, made up of an articulated system of waterways that support large portions of rice cultivation, protected natural areas, historical farmhouses, urban settlements, is the result of a long process of interaction between natural elements and human activities. Remote sensing and ground observations can play an important role in a high-accuracy mapping of the seasonal conditions of this kind of landscape. The flooding of paddy-rice fields determines a high scenic value of large portions of the rural landscape, that can be detected through remote sensing. The specificity of rice cultivation is that plants grow on flooded soils. Such a temporary condition of the landscape can become an unexpected tourist destination. From the methodological point of view, the research combines the potential of time series of satellite high-resolution imagery, for computing vegetation indexes (i.e. NDVI, NDWI etc.), and ground observations, through GIS mapping tools. This interpretation tools are useful to trace a network of slow scenic routes that allow perceiving such temporary landscape conditions and that support a territorial strategy aiming at a sustainable development of these fragile territories.
Potato is one of the world’s four major food crops as an important resource cultivated in about 150 countries. As precision agriculture has recently attracted increasing attention for its role in ...improving productivity, interest in yield monitoring is also increasing. Yield monitoring is a precision agriculture technology, and it can help farmhouse business management in the future by contributing to variable fertilization and supply and demand control. The present study was carried out to develop and evaluate a system that uses machine vision and deep learning technologies to estimate potato mass to monitor potato yield. The system performs object classification using the YOLOv5 algorithm to sort out potatoes among various foreign substances, object tracking using the DeepSORT algorithm to track the sorted potatoes, and volume calculation using the lengths of the major axis and minor axis of the tracked potatoes. The results of analyzing the function of the developed yield monitoring system showed an object detection rate of 95.2% and a weight measurement error of 9%, indicating that the computation load must be reduced through algorithm optimization to improve the accuracy and that error correction needs to be performed based on the potato position within the view angle.
Renewable energy plays a very important role in the improvement and promotion of environmental sustainability in agricultural-related activities.
This paper evaluates the techno-economic and ...environmental benefits of deploying photovoltaic (PV)- battery systems in a livestock farmhouse.
For the energy requirements of the farm to be determined, a walkthrough energy audit is conducted on the farmhouse. The farm selected for this study is located in southern Nigeria. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s Hybrid Optimization Modeling for Electric Renewable (HOMER) software was adapted for the purpose of the techno-economic analysis. It is found that a standalone PV/battery-powered system in farmhouse applications has higher economic viability when compared to its diesel-powered counterparts in terms of total net present cost (TNPC). A saving of 48% is achievable over the TNPC and Cost of Energy with zero emissions. The results obtained show
the numerous benefits of replacing diesel generators with renewable energy sources such as PV-battery systems in farming applications.
The initial premises of using a heat pump are that in winter (a cold period of a year) it is used to heat a farmhouse and in summer (a warm period), when heating the house is not required, it is used ...as part of a grain dryer. Analysis of the operation of a batch fluidized-bed grain dryer for maize seed grains (loading 75 kg), equipped with a heat pump for heating the drying agent, is performed. It is assumed that the source of low-potential heat in the heat pump is groundwater with a temperature of 6°C at the inlet of the heat exchanger and 8°C at the outlet, and the drying agent (air) is heated in the condenser of the heat pump up to 60°C. Freon R600a was chosen as the working body in the heat pump. It is shown that, under these conditions, the heat pump operated at the refrigeranttemperature in the evaporator of 3°C and its temperature in the condenser of 70°C makes it possible to reduce the consumption of heat for heating the drying agent by ~66% (the energy conversion coefficient is 2,98), and the use of partial recycling of the spent drying agent saves another 25% of energy. The analysis provides evidence for good perspectives of using a heat pump dryer in farms. A technique is developed for kinetic calculation of a batch fluidized-bed dryer for a granular material, taking into account the non-steady-state nature of the drying process. The technique is based on an analytical solution of the problem of mass conductivity for individual grains, makes use of the zonal method of calculation, and takes into account changes in the parameters of the drying agent during the process, both over the height of the fluidized bed and in time. The adequacy of the mathematical model for calculating the drying kinetics to the real process is demonstrated.
The widespread raising of swine in farms becomes a serious problem in terms of the emission of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4). This study aims to measure concentrations of carbon dioxide and ...methane, which account for the largest percentage of carbon emissions, to temporally estimate the carbon emitted during the pig-manure composting process. The research subject was a farmhouse raising 3000 growing pigs and 100 mother pigs. The capacity of the composting facility for pig manure treatment was 330 m2, and the daily treatment was about 6 tons. After the pig manure discharged from the pig farm was delivered to the composting facility, for the 8 days including 6 before mixing and 2 after mixing, the concentrations of CO2 and CH4 were measured. The result shows that the CO2 and CH4 concentrations in the composting facility were 1208 ± 385 ppm and 95 ± 10 ppm, respectively. In the comparison of concentrations before and after mixing at the composting facility, the values of both CO2 and CH4 increased, and the temperature increased as well. The concentration of CO2 and CH4 increased to 499 ± 103 ppm and 3 ± 11 ppm, respectively, and the temperature rose by 3.7 ± 1.0 °C and 1.6 ± 2.4 °C, respectively. In the correlation analysis (r = 0, p < 0.05), the carbon dioxide emission in the composting process was 15.564 ± 3.671 tons C/year, whereas carbon emission was 1.379 ± 0.147 tons C/year. The concentrations of CO2 and methane, which are the current major atmospheric pollution sources, were respectively analyzed during the pig-manure composting process in this study to understand their effects. Thus, this paper attempts to elucidate the carbon cycle by measuring and analyzing the carbon data obtained from livestock excretions to secure a supply chain based on the intelligent use of the data.
The paper will show a real case project that has been retrofitted in a sustainable and energy efficient way to promote sustainable development in rural areas. The historical farm house “H14” (built ...up in 1858 and located in North Bavaria) is a typical Franconian three-sided building. The building has been vacant for over 30 years and the renovation was founded by the Bavarian Federal Office for the Preservation of Monuments and Historical Buildings. The paper will give an overview about the retrofit of the historical farm house into a two-family house with event and seminar rooms and its integration into the rural environment. The renovation concept pursued the following goals: low carbon retrofit and renewable energy solutions, resource efficiency, use of existing, historic and renewable building materials, life-cycle costs, buildings physics as well as integrating regional flora and fauna.
Global warming and climate change are some of the greatest socio-scientific issues in recent decades. Many factors contribute to these issues, the footprint of human activities as well as natural ...phenomena. Human energy consumption in many sectors i.e food supply, livestock, industry, and transportation significantly increasing earth surface temperature average level and climate change. Various studies were carry out about global warming and climate change interdisciplinary. Integration of these socio-scientific issues into science learning as an effort to educate and enhance student environmental awareness and scientific literacy is necessary to do. Rational of this article is to studies global warming and climate change topics from integrative science context; biology (microbial activities, ruminants, and environmental impacts), chemistry (the various chemical reaction that causes greenhouse gases and global warming), and physics (temperature, heat, and global climate). This study is urgent because microbial activities that contribute into greenhouse gases releasing in ruminant enteric fermentation process haven't included and connected yet in Indonesia's science learning. Ruminant should be highlighted in these issues because Indonesia is an agricultural country which has enormous farmhouse area. In addition, students are expected to be able to solve problems and make the right decisions related to these issues. This article will discuss suggestion global warming and climate change topics in terms of microbial activities, ruminant and mitigation strategies to reduce GHG from livestock sector. This suggestion is expected to meet the Sustainable development goals.
Kveik are consortia of yeast used for farmhouse ale production in Western Norway. Yeast strains derived from these mixtures are known, for example, for their high fermentation rate, thermotolerance, ...lack of phenolic off flavor production (POF-) and strong flocculation phenotype. In this study, we used five single cell yeast isolates from different Kveik yeasts, analyzed their fermentation and flavor production, and compared it with a typical yeast used in distilleries using 20 °C and 28 °C as the fermentation temperatures. One of the isolates, Kveik No 3, showed an impairment of maltotriose utilization and thus a reduced ethanol yield. Kveik fermentations for spirit production often harbor bacteria for flavor enrichment. We sought to improve Kveik fermentations with non-conventional yeasts (NCY). To this end we co-fermented Kveik isolates with Hanseniaspora uvarum, Meyerozyma guilliermondii and Pichia kudriavzevii using 5:1 ratios (Kveik vs. NCY) at 20 °C. The combinations of Kveik No 1 with P. kudriavzevii and Kveik No 1 with Hanseniaspora uvarum showed substantially increased amounts of specific volatile aroma compounds that were previously identified in the NCYs. Our results indicate that Kveik isolates appear to be suitable for co-fermentations with certain NCY to enhance beer or spirit fermentations, increasing the potential of these yeasts for beverage productions.
Mineral-based turf has been used as a building material in Iceland for centuries. The vernacular Icelandic architecture is characterised by turf walls and sod roofs. This paper describes the ...historical development of the various archetypes of Icelandic turf farmhouses, researches the building techniques and materials applied, and qualifies the impact of the building properties on comfort and health of the former occupants. The study consisted of desk research, and a field study at the farmhouse of Glaumbær. In the wet and cold Icelandic climate, turf was an appropriate material that required its own building technology. The material was commonly available in settled areas of the island. Thick turf walls protected the residents against the harsh outdoor conditions, but had little effect on indoor air quality.
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