Agriculture Grain Processing

Farm machinery and implements represent another area of agriculture in which engineering principles have made a big impact. Tractors, harvesters, combines, and grain-processing equipment, for example, have to be designed with mechanical and electrical principles in mind and also must take into... 

Experimentally, however, the spectra are easy to observe, thick samples being tractable in either transmission or reflection without preparation. As the spectra seldom possess many narrow features that could be unduly affected by instrumental or other factors, robust methods for quantitation were possible. With the arrival of cheap instrumental computing from the 1980s onwards and the development of multivariate analysis methodology, NIR spectroscopy has undergone considerable expansion in use. It is now widely applied to automated, rapid and precise quantitative analyses in agriculture, industrial process control and noninvasive medical examinations. A typical and early example was determination of the protein content of grain and flour. 

Grain that is usable as food or feed is an expensive substrate for this fermentation process. A cheaper substrate might be some source of cellulose such as wood or agricultural waste. This, however, requires hydrolysis of cellulose to yield glucose. Such a process was used in Germany during World War II to produce yeast as a protein substitute. Another process for the hydrolysis of wood, developed by the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory, Madison, Wisconsin, uses mineral acid as a catalyst. This hydrolysis industry is very large in the former Soviet Union but it is not commercial elsewhere. 

In spite of the fact that contamination of cereals and grains and related products with mycotoxins causes food and feed-bome intoxications in man and livestock, zearalenone in low concentrations can be treated as a plant hormone which influences the development and yield of crop plants (Biesaga-Koscielniak 2001). This review focuses on the effect of low doses of zearalenone on the stimulation of selected physiological processes in plants important for agriculture production. 

In agriculture and food, NIR has been a powerful tool for decades. All shipments of grain leaving US ports are analyzed for moisture, fat, protein, and starch via NIR. Processed foods are also a prime venue for NIR percent of fat in cheese spread, hardness of wheat, and freshness of meats are just some of the applications in food. 

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