Award Data

Determining meat quality attributes in food animals is essential for genetic selection, sorting, and marketing. Ultrasound techniques have the potential to benefit the swine industry for improvements in both quality and yield measures by non-destructive and non-invasive means. Biotronics, Inc. has developed and markets products for evaluation of percent intramuscular fat (% IMF) in longissimus dor ...

The current state of the art of soybean processing requires heat processing to eliminate anti-nutrition factors and make the protein available for digestion. The proposed research will investigate the opportunity to process a new soybean variety that has been traditionally bred (not genetically modified) to eliminate and/or significantly reduce these anti-nutrition factors. This research will inve ...

Greenhouse farming is an absolute necessity to revive and create local agriculture industries in northern climatically challenged regions with short growing seasons. Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) has made significant strides in greenhouse farming technology. State of the art CEA farming utilizes direct control of lighting, temperature and CO2 in a hydroponics environment. Key advantages ...

WSSV is the most serious disease in farmed marine shrimp causing considerable financial losses throughout the last decade across the globe. It infects a wide variety of crustacean hosts including numerous species of wild and cultured marine shrimp, crayfish, and prawns. Although a multitude of vaccination strategies have been attempted with mixed results, no viable commercial product exists on the ...

This project develops a commercial process for modifying phosphorus recovered from dairy manure and other waste streams into marketable feed and fertilizer products. Phosphorus release from dairies and other concentrated feeding operations is a growing environmental problem. Meanwhile, domestic supplies of mined phosphorus are rapidly depleting, confronting U.S. agriculture with serious cost impac ...

Although aquaculture is the world's fastest-growing animal food production system, diseases remain a major impediment to the development and expansion of environmentally safe and sustainable aquaculture in the United States. Pathogenic fungal and bacterial infections of eggs, skin, and gills continue to kill millions of fish every year. At this time, there are no vaccines available to prevent fung ...

American energy and chemical industries are currently almost entirely dependent on oil (most of the it from foreign origin). In particular, the chemical industry has been optimizing, for at least 6 decades, most of its processes to be able to produce all the widely used chemicals (fuels,solvents,plastics) from petroleum. Growing environmental as well as geopolitical concerns demand alternatives to ...

Anaerobic digestion (AD) of animal manure offers the potential of offsetting the declining natural gas fossil fuel reserves with renewable energy while abating odor and methane greenhouse gas emissions. However, two significant problems must be resolved prior to achieving that potential. Those problems are: 1) the poor economics associated with anaerobic digestion and 2) the release of toxic, gree ...

Shellfish aquaculture occurs in coastal regions, where it is constrained by competition for alternative uses and by onset of the rapid environmental changes expected from global climate change. Commercial breeding programs can improve the yield of Pacific oysters, especially in regions, such as the U.S. West Coast, where farmers depend on seed produced in hatcheries. The Pacific oyster Crassostrea ...

The proposed project builds on prior research that has shown the potential for energy recovery from lignocellulosic biomass through an integrated anaerobic digestion (iADs) process. A 2005 USDA report places the current production of corn stover at 75 million dry tons per year and stated that this represents a major untapped source of agricultural biomass. The innovative anaerobic digestion proces ...