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Judged by their negative nutrient balances, low soil cover and low productivity, the predominant agro-pastoral farming systems in the Sudano-Sahelian zone of West Africa are highly unsustainable for crop production intensification. With kaolinite as the main clay type, the cation exchange capacity of the soils in this region, often less than 1 cmolc kg−1soil, depends heavily on the organic carbon (Corg) content. However, due to low carbon sequestration and to the microbe, termite and temperature-induced rapid turnover rates of organic material in the present land-use systems, Corg contents of the topsoil are very low, ranging between 1 and 8 g kg-1 in most soils. For sustainable food production, the availability of phosphorus (P) and nitrogen (N) has to be increased considerably in combination with an improvement in soil physical properties. Therefore, the adoption of innovative management options that help to stop or even reverse the decline in Corg typically observed after cultivating bush or rangeland is of utmost importance. To maintain food production for a rapidly growing population, targeted applications of mineral fertilisers and the effective recycling of organic amendments as crop residues and manure are essential. Any increase in soil cover has large effects in reducing topsoil erosion by wind and water and favours the accumulation of wind-blown dust high in bases which in turn improves P availability. In the future decision support systems, based on GIS, modelling and simulation should be used to combine (i) available fertiliser response data from on-station and on-farm research, (ii) results on soil productivity restoration with the application of mineral and organic amendments and (iii) our present understanding of the cause-effect relationships governing the prevailing soil degradation processes. This will help to predict the effectiveness of regionally differentiated soil fertility management approaches to maintain or even increase soil Corg levels.

Many researches have reported that nucleic acid in coconut water is in free form and at very low yields which makes it difficult to process in molecular studies. Our research attempted to compare two extraction methods to obtain a higher yield of total RNA in aromatic coconut water and monitor its change at various fruit stages. The first method used ethanol and sodium acetate as reagents; the second method used lithium chloride. We found that extraction using only lithium chloride gave a higher total RNA yield than the method using ethanol to precipitate nucleic acid. In addition, the total RNA from both methods could be used in amplification of betaine aldehyde dehydrogenase2 (Badh2) genes, which is involved in coconut aroma biosynthesis, and could be used to perform further study as we expected. From the molecular study, the nucleic acid found in coconut water increased with fruit age.

The levels of production diseases (PD) and the cow replacement rate are high in dairy farming. They indicate excessive production demands on the cow and a poor state of animal welfare. This is the subject of increasing public debate. The purpose of this study was to assess the effect of production diseases on the economic sustainability of dairy farms. The contributions of individual culled cows to the farm’s economic performance were calculated, based on milk recording and accounting data from 32 farms in Germany. Cows were identified as ‘profit cows’ when they reached their individual ‘break-even point’. Data from milk recordings (yield and indicators for PD) were used to cluster farms by means of a principal component and a cluster analysis. The analysis revealed five clusters of farms. The average proportion of profit cows was 57.5%, 55.6%, 44.1%, 29.4% and 19.5%. Clusters characterized by a high proportion of cows with metabolic problems and high culling and mortality rates had lower proportions of profit cows, somewhat irrespective of the average milk-yield per cow. Changing the perception of PD from considering it as collateral damage to a threat to the farms’ economic viability might foster change processes to reduce production diseases.

Problem statement: In general, there are a number of rural dialects i n Thai. However, four dialects are mainly spoken by Thai people residing in four core region including central, north, northeast and south regions. Recognizing and synthe sizing Thai speech with different dialects are consequently difficult. Approach: Prosody is an important factor that must be taken into account, since the prosody effects on not only the naturalne ss but also the intelligibility of speech. To treat the problem, the speech prosody is carefully preserved through modeling the fundamental frequency (F0) contours. The differences among the model parameters of four Thai dialects have been summarized. This study proposed an analysis of model parameters for Thai speech prosody with four regional dialects and two genders which is a preliminary wor k for speech recognition and synthesis. Fujisaki's modeling; a powerful tool to model the F0 contour h as been adopted. Seven derived parameters from the Fujisaki's model are as follows. The first para meter is baseline frequency which is the lowest lev el of F0 contour. The second and third parameters are the numbers of phrase commands and tone commands which reflect the frequencies of surges of the utterance in global and local levels, respectively. The fourth and fifth parameters are p hrase command and tone command durations which reflect the speed of speaking and the length of a s yllable, respectively. The sixth and seventh parameters are amplitudes of phrase command and tone command which reflect the energy of the global speech and the energy of local syllable. Results: In the experiments, each regional dialect includes 200 samples of one sentence with male and female speech. Therefore our speech database contains 1600 utterances in total. The results show ed that most of the proposed parameters can distinguish four kinds of regional dialects explici tly. Conclusion: By using the Fujisaki's model, the results confirm that the proposed parameters can di stinguish the regional dialects efficiently. In the future research, they were expected to be applied i n the speech recognition and synthesis with various regional dialect characteristics.

AbstractSugarcane juice was spray-dried under various conditions to determine the most suitable drying conditions for the manufacture of sugarcane juice powder. Initially, fresh, 30°Brix and 50°Brix sugarcane juice samples were dried in a laboratory-scale spray dryer at an air-drying temperature between 130 °C and 170 °C using maltodextrin, Arabic gum and dietary fiber as drying aids. It appeared that sugarcane juice should be concentrated under vacuum to 30°Brix and added with at least 15% maltodextrin before drying at 170 °C in order to obtain dried powder product with a low drying cost. After conducting the experiments in the laboratory, sugarcane juice powders were produced in a factory using an industrial-scale spray dryer under five drying conditions. It was found that the energy cost of industrial-scale production of sugarcane juice powder ranged between 0.77 USD and 2.06 USD per kg of powder. According to the results of the industrial-scale experiments, the sugarcane juice powder should be produced using vacuum evaporation of the sugarcane juice to 30°Brix prior to adding maltodextrin at 30% by weight and then spray drying at 190 °C.

AbstractRiceberry rice has a special characteristic of being specially bred with high nutrients. High-value added products from riceberry are being promoted targeting health-conscious consumers. To provide supporting information for sustainable food systems, environmental footprinting was applied for evaluating the environmental performance of a ready-to-eat product of riceberry rice mixed with kidney red bean called “Riceberry + KU”, developed by Kasetsart University in Thailand. Based on sold unit as the unit of analysis, the carbon footprint of Riceberry + KU was 5.24 gCO2e per 300 g. Interestingly, white rice had the highest carbon footprint and riceberry rice as well as the riceberry product had at least 30% lower values. However, using nutrient-based scores, although white rice still had the highest carbon footprint, Riceberry + KU had 80% lower and the riceberry rice had 65% lower values. This resulted from the highest nutritional levels found in Riceberry + KU along with the lower greenhouse gas emissions from riceberry field during the cultivation stage. Similar trends were found in the other impact categories assessed by using life cycle assessment as well. To provide appropriate information to consumers for making more sustainable food choices, the environmental performance based on nutrient quality resulting from different farming systems and processing methods should be used to derive recommendations for moving toward sustainable food systems. The nutrition-environment nexus assessment could be very useful for supporting consumers toward making more sustainable food choices.

AbstractIn power system load flow studies, it is common to ignore wind park (WP) losses completely, since WPs are obliged to provide reactive power as a free‐of‐charge ancillary service. Strongly simplified WP loss estimations are also widespread. Prevailing loss modelling approaches may result in substantial and so far usually ignored reactive power allocation inefficiencies. The innovation of this paper lies in demonstrating this and in presenting an alternative modelling approach that combines speed, ease‐of‐use and accuracy.Calculations are based on a generic WP connected to 110 kV. It is simulated once using gearless permanent magnet synchronous generators and once using doubly fed induction generators. In this way, for the first time, the consequences of neglecting differences between wind generator types when calculating reactive power‐related losses are systematically quantified. Loss‐minimal dispatch is assessed using heuristic optimal power flow. Relevance of findings is demonstrated for the application of reducing system losses based on reactive power control of WPs in closed‐loop optimal power flow schemes. It is shown that non‐consideration of WP losses may lead to dispatch decisions where the increase in WP losses outweighs the achieved loss reduction in the 110 kV system by 400%. The study facilitates comparing reactive power ancillary services from WPs to that of other technologies from an economic perspective. It concludes by a benchmarking overview of pros and cons of modelling alternatives. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.