A b s t r a c t. This paper provides the analysis of results of biogas and methane yield for vegetable dumplings waste: dough with fat, vegetable waste, and sludge from the clarifier. Anaerobic digestion of food waste used in the experiments was stable after combining the substrates with a digested pulp composed of maize silage and liquid manure (as inoculum), at suitable ratios. The study was carried out in a laboratory scale using anaerobic batch reactors, at controlled (mesophilic) temperature and pH conditions. The authors present the chemical reactions accompanying biodegradation of the substrates and indicate the chemical compounds which may lead to acidification during the anaerobic digestion. An anaerobic digestion process carried out with the use of a dough-and-fat mixture provided the highest biogas and methane yields.

Maize (Zea mays L.) grain endosperm is triploid (3n), of which 2n come from the male (transferred by pollen) and only 1n from the female plant, thus a major impact of the male form can be expected on grain quality parameters. A good example of this relationship is the phenomenon of xenia. The aim of this study was to determine the effect of pollen on grain quality. The field experiment was conducted in 2011; seeds were harvested from eight cultivars: Bosman, Blask, Tur, Kozak, Bielik, Smok, SMH 220 and Kresowiak, derived from free pollination and controlled self-pollination of maize. Analyses of nutrient contents and starch content in the grain were conducted in the laboratory. In addition, 1000 grain weight and the hectoliter weight of all grain samples were recorded. The results confirmed differences in grain quality of maize hybrids obtained by self-pollination and by open pollination. Grain of maize plants obtained by open-pollination was characterised by higher contents of N-free extract and starch, and lower protein content. Undertaking further studies on this subject may indicate specific recommendations for agricultural practice, such as mixtures of hybrids with good combining abilities, which will contribute to improved grain quality without additional costs.

This paper demonstrates the possible conclusions which can be drawn from an analysis of entropy and information. Because of its universality, entropy can be widely used in different subjects, especially in biomedicine. Based on simulated data the similarities and differences between the grouping of attributes and testing of their independencies are shown. It follows that a complete exploration of data sets requires both of these elements. A new concept introduced in this paper is that of normed information gain, allowing the use of any logarithm in the definition of entropy.

Survival is one of the most important traits in genetic improvement programmes in livestock. The objective of this study is to determine sex, inbreeding, and birth type effects as well as their interactions on birth survival in lambs of two breeds. Records of 6356 Polish Merino (PM) breed and 9143 Wielkopolska sheep (WS) were taken into the analysis. Relationships between survival and three binary variables (sex, inbreeding, type of birth) were estimated by the use of logistic regression. Interactions among these variables were also included in the model. Thus, the odds ratios and synergy coefficients were estimated. Lowest birth mortality was registered for inbred females from single birth. Differences in survival between the studied breeds were observed. Negligible single effects of sex, inbreeding and birth type for PM were estimated, whereas for WS these effects were significant (P<0.01). Opposite dependencies were obtained for interactions among these variables. In the case of PM, synergy between birth survival and joint effects of sex-inbreeding, sex-birth type, sex-inbreeding-birth type were highly significant, but for WS only inbreeding-birth type interaction was considerable. Hence, a generalisation of the obtained results seems to be difficult: they exhibit a very complex background of lamb survival.

Mastitis is one of the major health problems in dairy herds leading to a reduction in the leading to a reduction in the quality of milk and economic losses. The research aimed to present the system, which uses electronic 3D motion detectors to detect the early symptoms of mastitis. The system would allow more effective prevention of this illness. The experiment was carried out on 118 cows (64 Holstein Friesian and 54 Brown Swiss). The animals were kept in free-stall barn with access to pasture. The occurrence of mastitis cases was noticed in veterinary register. Microbiological culture was taken from milk in order to confirm the development of infection. Data from motion detectors were defined as time spent by animals on feed intake, ruminating, physical activity and rest, and were expanded by adding information about feeding group, breed type and lactation number. During analyses, two approaches were used to process the same dataset: artificial neural networks (ANN) and logistic regression. The obtained ANN and the logistic regression models proved to be satisfactory from the perspective of applied criteria of goodness of fit (area under curve—exceed 0.8). Quality parameters (accuracy, sensitivity and specifity) of logistic regression are relatively high (larger than 0.73), whereas the ranks of significance of the studied variables varied across datasets. These proposed models can be useful for automating the detection of mastitis once integrated into the farm’s IT system.