Browsing by Browse by SEO 2008 "820399 Industrial Crops not elsewhere classified"

We simulated pre-breeding in evolving gene banks - populations of exotic and crop types undergoing optimal contribution selection for long-term genetic gain and management of population genetic diversity. The founder population was based on crosses between elite crop varieties and exotic lines of field pea ('Pisum sativum') from the primary genepool, and was subjected to 30 cycles of recurrent selection for an economic index composed of four traits with low heritability: black spot resistance, flowering time and stem strength (measured on single plants), and grain yield (measured on whole plots). We compared a small population with low selection pressure, a large population with high selection pressure, and a large population with moderate selection pressure. Single seed descent was compared with S0-derived recurrent selection. Optimal contribution selection achieved higher index and lower population coancestry than truncation selection, which reached a plateau in index improvement after 40 years in the large population with high selection pressure. With optimal contribution selection, index doubled in 38 years in the small population with low selection pressure and 27-28 years in the large population with moderate selection pressure. Single seed descent increased the rate of improvement in index per cycle but also increased cycle time.

As governments around the world have mandated the use of corn, sorghum, wheat, soybean oil and rapeseed oil to produce biofuel, the prices of these commodities have become correlated with the price of petroleum. Use of biofuel limits dependence on imported petroleum and also reduces emissions of greenhouse gases as these fuels are renewable. Meanwhile, the overall demand for these crops for food and feed continues to rise with increasing global population and affluence. World population is expected to increase from 7 to 9 billion people by 2050. To date, agricultural production has kept pace with demand. Plantings and yields have increased substantially over the past 50 years in most regions of the world. Corn yields in the USA increased from 2 mt/ha/yr in 1950 to more than 10 mt/ha/yr in 2009. Traditional genetic improvement, irrigation, use of fertilizers and chemicals, farming practices and genetic modification have all worked in tandem to improve yields. About one-third of corn produced in the USA is currently converted to ethanol; the remainder is used as domestic and international animal feed and for corn sugar production. The EU has mandated that 10% of energy used for transportation will be achieved from agriculture by 2020. Grain and oilseed consumption for animal feed continue to increase every year. Prices for energy-rich feed grains will likely continue to increase in the future. Feed conversion efficiency has improved with advances in animal genetics and ingredient processing. Rapid nutrient measurement techniques using near infra-red reflectance spectrometry and net energy diet formulation promise to further enhance efficiency.

The literature contains a wide range of reported values for the content of most chemical constituents of feed grains and meals. It is not possible to assess accurately how much of this variation is due to genotypic and environmental factors and how much to differences in methodologies between laboratories. We have reviewed the literature for the preparation and analysis of feed grains (cereals, legumes, and oilseeds) and made recommendations for procedures considered to give the most accurate and reliable results. Recommendations are also made for a quality assurance scheme, an inter-laboratory evaluation program, and the use of reference materials. Australia-wide adoption of these practices should ensure that any future variations observed can be ascribed to genotype and/or environment. This review is part of a national premium feed grains quality project which, in turn, is part of a program to provide more accurate and reliable information about the true value of our feed grains to the domestic and international feeds industries.

Plantation production systems, plantation labour regimes and a foreign workforce typified European investment in the large-scale agricultural sector in colonial Malaya. Analogous structures and trends continue to be influential in Malaysia's contemporary commercial agricultural sector. Initially, the politics and organization of the East India Company and the pursuit of tropical commodities corresponded with the facilitation and channelling of Indian migrant labour for coffee and sugar cultivation in Malaya. The subsequent development of the rubber industry represented the first major transition to more highly capitalized large-scale farming for international markets. In the 1990s, oil palm replaced rubber as the premier crop in a second agrarian transition, consistent with Malaysia's economic and political imperatives, social policy and the global demand for palm oil. There are important continuities in the rubber and oil palm agricultural transitions. These include comparable plantation structures, labour systems and a continuing reliance on migrant labour, despite the growth of the national labour force. The correlation between plantation systems and Malaysia's foreign labour policy should be viewed through the prism of challenges to large-scale agricultural production and countervailing forces that might be acting on the Malaysian state.

Direct UV detection of carbohydrates in free solution capillary electrophoresis at 270 nm is made possible by a photo-oxidation reaction. Glucose, rhamnose and xylose were shown to have unique UV absorption spectra hypothesizing different UV absorbing intermediates for their respective photo-oxidation. NMR spectroscopy of the photo-oxidation end products proved they consisted of carboxylates and not malondialdehyde as previously theorized and that oxygen thus plays a key role in the photo-oxidation pathway. Adding the photo-initiator Irgacure® 2959 in the background electrolyte increased sensitivity by 40% at an optimum concentration of 1 x 10⁻⁴mM and 1 x 10⁻⁸mM for conventional 50 μm i.d. capillaries and for the corresponding extended light path capillaries, respectively.