Silsoe Research Institute

When it comes to air pollution complaints, odours are often the most significant contributor. Sources of odour emissions range from natural to anthropogenic. Mitigation of odour can be challenging, multifaceted, site-specific, and is often confounded by its complexity—defined by existing (or non-existing) environmental laws, public ordinances, and socio-economic considerations. The objective of this paper is to review and summarize odour legislation in selected European countries (France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, United Kingdom, Spain, The Netherlands, Italy, Belgium), North America (USA and Canada), South America (Chile and Colombia), as well as Oceania (Australia and New Zealand) and Asia (Japan, China). Many countries have incorporated odour controls into their legislation. However, odour-related assessment criteria tend to be highly variable between countries, individual states, provinces and even counties and towns. Legislation ranges from (1) no specific mention in environmental legislation that regulates pollutants which are known to have an odour impact to (2) extensive details about odour source testing, odour dispersion modeling, ambient odour monitoring, (3) setback distances, (4) process operations, and (5) odour control technologies and procedures. Agricultural operations are one specific source of odour emissions in rural and suburban areas and a model example of such complexities. Management of agricultural odour emissions is important because of the dense consolidation of animal feeding operations and the advance of housing development into rural areas. Overall, there is a need for continued survey, review, development, and adjustment of odour legislation that considers sustainable development, environmental stewardship, and socio-economic realities, all of which are amenable to a just, site-specific, and sector-specific application.

The middle mountain region of Nepal, which occupies some 30% of the total land, is the homeland of 45% of the total population, with agriculture being the main source of their livelihoods. Hill farming is primarily based on organic manure with livestock, forest and crops being major components of an integrated system. The aim of this study is to develop and promote improved methods for research and development organizations to identify cost-effective and appropriate soil fertility management strategies through; providing an improved understanding of the biophysical and socio-economic factors affecting the adaptability of sustainable soil management strategies in hillside systems, developing methodologies for evaluating soil fertility technologies and management systems for differently resource farmers in different farming systems, and strengthening the capability of local professionals in collaborating institutions to provide useful information to farmers. The work is placing emphasis on promoting cost-effective methods of soil fertility management, building on farmers' own knowledge and systems. Participatory techniques have been used for gaining a better understanding of fertility indicators, trends and existing soil management practices during 2000/01 in the western hills of Nepal. Farmers are now concerned that increasing amounts of chemical fertilizer at increasingly higher cost have to be applied, soils are becoming “harder” and production is declining. As a result farmers in four agro-ecological zones opted to either test methods for “improving” the quality of farm yard manure (FYM), or “improve” crop residue management. Early results show that through covering the FYM with black plastic sheets, yield increases of over 30% can be achieved. The use of participatory farm management techniques is providing a basis for local NGOs and farmers to evaluate their own experiments and develop soil fertility technologies and systems for their environments.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/ajn.v1i0.7536 Agronomy Journal of Nepal (Agron JN) Vol. 1: 2010 pp.1-9

A presentation at the 1990 Conservation and Management of Rivers conference in York simultaneously inspired and shamed delegates because the young Czech speaker showed what could be achieved to restore rivers through tenacious effort, without legislation to oblige such action. This highlighted how little was actually being achieved in those countries with the necessary legislation, institutional structure and funding in place. The next morning a group of like-minded delegates met and decided how to bring about lasting change — this was the embryonic start of river restoration centres. In 1992 the UK River Restoration Project, the pre-cursor to the River Restoration Centre, was launched, with the aim of demonstrating how to achieve river restoration and quantify the many benefits that result from this. A major European partnership project, started in 1994, undertook and reported on several large-scale river restoration projects. The project also established a European Centre for River Restoration, creating a network of organizations that provided practical information on river restoration and helping other countries to develop their own centres, projects and plans. Since 1995 several river restoration centres have been established in Europe, with equivalent organizations formed in parallel in the United States (US), Asia and Australia. The International RiverFoundation was formed in 2003 in Australia; this supports and rewards river restoration at a global scale. More recently, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as the World Wide Fund for Nature that operate globally have successfully used the international business sector's obligations on corporate social responsibility to support community-led actions to fund work that benefits the wider water environment and local people. In future it is anticipated that coordinating centres across the world will be established, linking independent local groups to form national associations that can advocate river restoration locally, but also have an influence in national and international arenas. With no political or constitutional ties these organizations will be in a strong position to encourage river restoration globally.

PurposeThis paper aims to introduce and identify a new 3D handling operation (bin picking) for natural discrete food products using food categorisation.Design/methodology/approachThe research shows a new food categorisation and the relation between food ordering processes and food categories. Bin picking in the food industry needs more flexible vision software compared to the manufacturing industry in order to decrease the degree of disarray of food products and transfer them into structure.FindingsIt has been shown that there are still manual operated ordering processes in food industry such as bin picking; it just needs new ideas of image processing algorithms such as active shape models (ASMs) on its development in order to recognise the highly varying shapes of food products.Research limitations/implicationsThis research was aimed at locating a new ordering process and proving a new principle, but for practical implementation this bin picking solution needs to be developed and tested further.Originality/valueIdentifying new ordering processes via food categorisation is unique and applying ASMs to bin picking opens a new industrial sector (food industry) for 3D handling.

This special issue of the Journal concludes publication of enhanced papers from the 6th European Conference on Precision Agriculture (3 papers) and the 2nd Precision Crop Protection Conference (5 papers) both held in 2007. Some 22 good papers from the former and 10 from the latter have now been published bringing together an important body of research from several disciplines to the attention of the precision agriculture research community. Technology development was a prime driver for precision agriculture in its early phases. With the maturing of the concept, other disciplines (soil science, crop science and many others) have taken their place alongside technology. Technology continues to develop and the developments are being applied to PA as illustrated in the three 6ECPA papers; they describe RFID tags for produce tracing, laser rangefinding applied to field crops and wireless soil sensors. Precision crop protection includes the investigation of weed, insect and fungal pests, the latter two being the topic of 3 of the 2PCPC papers. Technology features in the last two papers, both dealing with precision spray application.

Previous work has suggested that dimensional data obtained from digital image analysis (DIA) has potential to predict the slaughter liveweights of finished beef cattle (Hyslop et al, 2008). Both farmers and cattle buyers may benefit from being able to select animals to meet slaughter specifications more accurately on-farm. The objective of the current study was to assess the feasibility of an on-farm DIA system to predict a number of characteristics in beef steers at slaughter.

Food quality aspects of farmed turbot (Psetta maxima) were compared following two methods of slaughter: the current commercial method, by immersion in an ice slurry, which is then dewatered after approximately 20 min, or by first humanely, electrically stunning the fish using a prototype commercial stunner, before immersion in an ice slurry, which is dewatered after 20 min. Quality was assessed for up to 10 days of storage on ice following slaughter. No differences were found between the slaughter methods in terms of an overall carcass quality: overall appearance, haemorrhage, damage, burst gall bladder, staining of the body cavity by leakage from the gut or damage to the spine. No detectable difference was found between the treatments using the industry standard freshness scoring system, the Quality Index Method. Both groups of fish were classified as ‘Fresh’ after 10 days of storage on ice. Using objective measurements of colour, no differences between fish from either treatment were found in fillet colour. Changes in flesh pH were similar in electrically stunned and traditionally killed fish with a mean pH (±SE) at 2 h post-mortem of 6.80±0.027 declining to 6.44±0.032 at 24 h post-mortem. Humane electrical stunning of turbot at slaughter neither detectably improved nor decreased product quality as measured between 1 and 10 days of storage on ice.