Award Data

Specialty Crop production margins are eroded by input costs impacts of weather pests anddiseases and market price fluctuations. Producers routinely overproduce to hedge against lossesfrom environmental impacts and ensure sufficient supply to meet retail account demand furtherreducing their average margins. If they had greater certainty in advance of how much they willproduce and when it will be ha ...

We propose an innovative robotic technology to tap slash pine trees and collect their oleoresinfor processing using an unmanned fully autonomous long-range robotic forest rover as part ofthe strategy to revive the dormant turpentine industry in the Southeastern United States. Thisintegrated system will replace the labor-intensive work of collecting slash pine oleoresin.The objectives of this Phase ...

Making production of tilapia (and other warm-water fish) financially viable and sustainable on asmall-farm scale depends on several factors. The number-one constraint is the need to maintaino o tropical water temperatures (70 to 100 F) for the fish. To address this need our research focuseson heating the water in individual fish tanks via a closed-loop heat-transfer system usingrenewable energy. O ...

Embryo transfer is one of the tools a livestock producer can utilize to rapidly increase the genetic gainwithin the herd overcome low pregnancy rates during physiological stress or leverage high qualityfemales by producing multiple offspring per female (rather than 1/year).The ability to transfer fresh orfrozen embryos is important in dairy and beef cattle reproduction as well as in sheep goats de ...

With over a trillion cups of caffeinated beverages consumed each year caffeine is arguably theworld's most frequently consumed stimulant. Caffeine is widely used to enhance athleticperformance body composition pain relief and mental acuity. Naturally caffeinated beveragesinclude coffee black and green tea cola cocoa guarana yerba mat© and Yaupon tea.According to the Tea Association of the USA tea ...

Over the past decade the U.S. has experienced substantial growth in the number of new agri- food businesses launched. At the same time rural firms and farms face obstacles impeding theirabilities to fully capitalize on food startup opportunities. A significant barrier to entry is theability to navigate food laws and regulations and legal and regulatory resources for rural foodentrepreneurs are sca ...

MBio Diagnostics is proposing to develop a portable rapid inexpensive technology formore effective detection of harmful algal bloom (HAB) toxins in shellfish.The proposedproduct will help producers and managers get more product to market while ensuringthe safety of this commercially important food supply during HAB events.Shellfish arefilter feeders and can accumulate HAB toxins during blooms.Thes ...

Testing Bio Sole biosensor as a wearable technology to quantify BAC in real time

lnterleukinILand granulocyte macrophage colony stimulating factorGM CSFare endogenous immune activatorsEarlier studies using soluble ILand GM CSF as vaccine adjuvants were unsuccessful due to toxicity or suboptimal responseWe developed versions of ILand GM CSF with a glycosylated phosphatidylinositolGPIanchor added at the carboxyl terminusallowing incorporation into lipid bilayers such as in influ ...

Tuberculosis is a persistent infectious disease that threatens the health of people and numerous mammalian species throughout the worldMonitoring of Mycobacterium tuberculosisMtbinfections in animal models has often relied on host mortalitybacterial loadsand qualitative assessment of pathology at necropsyThese are blunt toolslargely unrelated to the markers used for diagnosis and epidemiological s ...