Green tobacco sickness is an illness associated with nicotine exposures among tobacco harvesters. Agricultural workers manually harvest tobacco and thus have the potential for skin exposure to nicotine, particularly on the hands. Often gloves are not worn as it hinders the harvesters' ability to harvest the tobacco leaves. The purposes of this study were to measure the concentration of nicotine...

Combine harvesters have a very important task in grain crop harvesting. Combine harvesters must fulfil lot of technological requirements regarding the field conditions, crop type, as well as the quality performance and optimal costs. The problem is that it is the main harvesting technology of cereals in the world and it has seasonal character of work, which has to be done in a relatively short ...

The University of Minnesota Forage Team is proud to announce the second edition of the Forage Quarterly. The January issues ranges in content from alternative forage systems to acquisition of pasturelands. In addition to the valuable information in this edition, the UMN Forage Team would like to inform you of our upcoming winter meetings. The program was designed to address key forage productio...

This paper reports the application of different analytical tools to a basic continuous conditioning (CC) circuit for electrostatic vibration energy harvesters (e-VEHs). We address the fundamental issues of this conditioning circuit and give design advice that enhances the performance of e-VEHs employing this circuit. This circuit is widely used for harvesters with or without an electret layer. ...

Forage sorghum is considered to be the most heat and drought resistant summer forage with a fairly high green forage yield. Forage sorghum is more economical to grow as compared to forage maize with fairly high economic returns. The total area under forages in 2012 in Punjab was 1.82 million hectares with green forage production of 38.8 million tons. The land area of Punjab under forage sorghum...

Sixty Holstein cows were assigned to two treatments at 21 d before calving and were group-fed a prepartum diet with or without yeast culture. After parturition, cows were individually fed one of five treatments for 140 d: 1) 21% forage neutral detergent fiber (NDF) without yeast culture, 2) 21% forage NDF with yeast culture, 3) 17% forage NDF without yeast culture, 4) 17% forage NDF with yeast ...

The effect of stocking rate on forage growth has attracted much research attention in forage science. Findings show that forage growth may be affected by stocking rate, and there is a consensus that high stocking rates lead to soil compaction, which could also in turn affect forage growth because of the changing soil hydrology and increased soil impedance to forage root penetration. In this stu...

Insects, such as stinkbugs, are able to produce noxious defence chemicals to ward off predators, nevertheless, some ethnic groups have recipes to render them delicious. We provide an example of edible stinkbugs (Encosternum delegorguei) used by two locally separate ethnic groups in South Africa, the Vhavenda and Mapulana, with a third group, the Bolobedu using them for commercial purposes. Stru...

This paper presents a new energy-harvesting system with two identical piezoelectric energy harvesters in a tandem configuration. Each harvester consists of a piezoelectric beam and a circular cylinder. Experiments are performed to investigate the energy-harvesting performances of this system in water. It can be found that their energy-harvesting performances are all different from that of the s...