The agricultural sector is considered as one of the main elements of a “functional” society and its welfare for providing means to fulfil the most basic human need for food. In the past, an improved overall welfare of developed countries was directly related to early investment in conventional farming machinery parallel to the industrial development. With the expected future population increase and climate change, farm yield gaps are expected to increase and become more volatile. The awareness of negative externalities ...

Cocoa (Theobroma cacao L.) is an important agricultural commodity that is important to the economies of many countries in the world. Due to cocoa’s dependence on fertile forests soils, its production is a major cause of deforestation and soil degradation in producing countries. When grown in agroforestry systems it can conserve biodiversity, sequester carbon (C), and maintain soil fertility. There are many cocoa agroforests which are managed without synthetic agrochemicals. Because organic cocoa certification is now ...

Milk proteins are one of the heat-sensitive nutritional components, especially whey proteins changing their structure through thermal treatment, consequently denaturizing and aggregating. The transformation of native whey proteins structure in presence of shear stress resulted in the microparticulation, which affected the functional properties. Many authors investigated these parameters with different conditions; however, understanding the combination of relevant parameters of the microparticulation process of whey ...

Renewable energy is the only way to cope with changing climate for under-developed countries like Pakistan, particularly solar energy must be opted out due to plentiful sunshine hours. Being a natural liquid food, milk is a complete nutritional diet containing all of the essential minerals such as protein, fat and vitamins. However, improper post milking handling and storage resulting in wastage due to microorganisms and bacterial multiplication. The present study enables the application of decentralized solar-based ...

This thesis combines experimental work on heterogeneous crop populations (HP) and species mixtures (SM) with a social scientific and participatory approach. Chapter 1 introduces crop communities as a concept to integrate multiple approaches to diversify farming systems. HPs provide intraspecific and SM interspecific diversity in crop communities. A key challenge for the genetic improvement of HPs, especially for root traits is to combine effective selection to improve HPs while maintaining intraspecific diversity. ...

Cultivating apples on sites previously used for cultivation of apples leads to suppression of vegetative performance of apple trees and losses in fruit yields. This replant effect is attributed to an apple related form of soil fertility loss named ‘soil fatigue’ and ‘Apple Replant Disease’ (ARD). Replant disease strongly affects profitability of apple production in nurseries specialised in fruit trees, as well as on fruit orchards. Recent studies focus on causally linked agents of the replant disease and quantification ...