Summary
Bovine coronavirus (BCoV) is a causative agent of respiratory and enteric diseases in cattle and calves. BCoV infection was also evident in captive wild ruminants. Recently, water deer are ...recognized as the most common wildlife to approach farmhouses and livestock barns in Korea. Therefore, we investigated 77 nasal swab samples from non‐captive wild water deer (Hydropotes inermis) between November 2016 and September 2017 and identified three samples positive for coronavirus, indicating potential for respiratory shedding. The full genomic sequences of the water deer coronavirus were closely related to BCoV (>98%). Therefore, effective biosecurity system in bovine farms would be necessary to prevent contact between farm ruminants and free‐ranging wild water deer.
Nagayamon-gate still remains in various style mainly in rural areas. The paper aims to clarify actual conditions about successful ways to maintain Nagayamon-gate. Investigations about 23 examples in ...Tochigi Prefecture were took into practice from viewpoints of setting premises including Nagayamon-gate, uses of the very Gate, relations between farmhouse, and so on. The conclusion could be summarized as follows: 1) 3 aspects of Nagayamon-gate’s value, those are historical-cultural, symbolic, and spatial, are extracted from the analysis; 2) 23 examples of maintaining Nagayamon-gate are classified into 3 categories, each of them is considered as mainly embodying of the previous 3 values.
Thermal energy storage technology can effectively promote the clean heating policy in northern China. Therefore, phase-change heat storage heating technology has been widely studied, both ...theoretically and experimentally, but there is still a lack of engineering application research. According to the characteristics of heating load in northern rural areas, a kind of solar heating system using phase-change materials (PCMs) for heat storage is proposed. Furthermore, a farmhouse is used to demonstrate the practical engineering applications of the heating system. The heating system consists of the phase-change heat storage device (PCHSD), solar thermal panels, and a floor radiant heating terminal, which can realize the effective utilization of solar energy. Considering solar power generation capacity, heating load characteristics of farm buildings, and the local electricity price model, four potential operation modes of the heating system are established. Then, the corresponding control strategies are proposed for the four operating modes. The actual operation data of the heating system under different operating modes were collected continuously, and the application effect of the heating system was evaluated from the aspects of thermal efficiency of the device, the renewable energy efficiency, thermal comfort level, and economy. The experimental results show that: (1) The thermal efficiency of the device is mainly affected by the heating load, which can reach more than 80% during the test period; (2) the renewable energy efficiency of the system is positively correlated with the solar radiation intensity, and the maximum can reach 100% when the solar radiation is sufficient; (3) the system maintains excellent thermal comfort in all conditions, with the average and the highest thermal comfort time accounting for 80% and 100%, respectively; (4) compared with the average level of existing clean heating technology, the annual operating cost of the system is reduced by 27.3%, and the economy is significant. The results show that the system achieves effective performance during the test period.
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.
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