Award Data

American Solar, Inc. proposes to research and analyze two low cost solar air heating systems for poultry houses. The solar heating systems will use an existing poultry house metal roof and a new wall-mounted, solar curtain system to harvest renewable, solar heated air. The solar heated air will displace cold outside ventilation air that would be brought into the house and require heating by non-re ...

Horn Farms Inc needs to routinely produce sufficient annual seed stocks to support commercial production of key canna varieties. Thus the greenhouse diagnostic and sanitization program is necessary to meet production goals. Accurate visual disease assessment is carried out at 2 and 4 weeks of growth (instead of 10 and 16 weeks). Genus specific PCR primers were developed which detect all viruses in ...

Thin saws, although more difficult to manufacture and use, conserve valuable wood fiber resources and make the users of these thin saws more competitive globally. As such, thinner sawblades are growing in popularity in spite of the "challenges" associated with their manufacture and use. Three of those challengers revolve around brazing tips into thinner sawblades1) Because the steel is thinner, le ...

Spoilage losses of fresh fruits and vegetables are estimated to account for 20% of all edible food losses in the U.S. alone. This loss is significantly higher in developing countries due to less sophisticated harvesting and processing equipment and practices. For instance, it is believed that 40% of all food production is lost due to spoilage in India. Microbial contamination of the harvested prod ...

The use of sub-therapeutic concentrations of anti-microbial agents in animal feed has contributed to theproductivity of the U.S. meat and dairy industries by preventing infectious diseases, by decreasing theamount of feed required and by increasing the rate of animal weight gain. However, failure to observerecommended practices of drug withdrawal can result in concentrations of antibiotic residue ...

The ready-to-assemble (RTA) construction system is a new method for assembling wood structuresbuilt from the following engineered wood products: parallel strand lumber (PSL), laminated strandlumber (LSL), and laminated veneer lumber (LVL). The RTA system is designed for rapid assemblyby small crews of unskilled labor using common hand tools. The design of the RTA systemincorporates engineered w ...

Equine infectious anemia virus (EIAV) is a retrovirus that causes a chronic infection in horses. In theabsence of a vaccine, the control of this disease depends on the diagnosis and elimination of infectedhorses. Currently approved diagnostic procedures utilize agar gel diffusion (AGID), or enzyme-linkedimmunosorbant (ELISA) methodologies to detect antibodies against the virus in horse sera as e ...

Water quality and soil erosion are high priority issues for U.S. agriculture. In more humid areas of theU.S., vegetation filter strips have proven to be an effective method of reducing erosion and improvingwater quality. Filter strips are less effective in the West due to sparser vegetation and more variablerainfall. In addition, establishment of vegetation is more difficult in many western wat ...

This project addresses two problems of environmental and economic importance to New Mexico.The first problem is the value-added utilization of pecan shells, and agricultural waste from oneof New Mexico's most important crops. The second problem is the need to remove metal andorganic contaminants of environmental concern from wastewater produced by some of NewMexico's economically important indust ...

This proposal suggests the development of surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) instrumentation capable of detecting nanogram levels of sulfamethazine per ml of extracted sample. Although the use of subtherapeutic concentrations of anti-microbial agents in animal feed has contributed to the productivity of the U.S. meat and dairy industries by preventing infectious diseases, by decreasing the ...