While fulfilling the food demand of an increasing population remains a major global concern, more than one-third of food is lost or wasted in postharvest operations. Reducing the postharvest losses, especially in developing countries, could be a sustainable solution to increase food availability, reduce pressure on natural resources, eliminate hunger and improve farmers’ livelihoods. Cereal grains are the basis of staple food in most of the developing nations, and account for the maximum postharvest losses on a calorific basis among all agricultural commodities. As much as 50%–60% cereal grains can be lost during the storage stage due only to the lack of technical inefficiency. Use of scientific storage methods can reduce these losses to as low as 1%–2%. This paper provides a comprehensive literature review of the grain postharvest losses in developing countries, the status and causes of storage losses and discusses the technological interventions to reduce these losses. The basics of hermetic storage, various technology options, and their effectiveness on several crops in different localities are discussed in detail.

[1] Conceptualizing catchments as physicochemical filters is an appealing way to link streamflow discharge and concentration time series to hydrological and biogeochemical processing in hillslopes and drainage networks. Making these links explicit is challenging in complex watersheds but may be possible in highly modified catchments where hydrological and biogeochemical processes are simplified. Linking hydrological and biogeochemical filtering in highly modified watersheds is appealing from a water quality perspective in order to identify the major controls on chemical export at different spatial and temporal scales. This study investigates filtering using a 10 year data set of hydrological and biogeochemical export from a small (<500 km 2 ) agricultural watershed in Illinois, the Little Vermilion River (LVR) Watershed. A number of distinct scaling regimes were identified in the Fourier power spectrum of discharge and nitrate, phosphate, and atrazine concentrations. These scaling regimes were related to different runoff pathways and spatial scales throughout the catchment (surface drainage, tile drains, and channel flow in the river). Wavelet analysis indicated increased coupling between discharge and in-stream concentrations at seasonal-annual time scales. Using a multiresolution analysis, nitrate, phosphate, and atrazine loads exported at annual scales were found to exhibit near-linear scaling with annual streamflow, suggesting that at these scales the export dynamics could be approximated as chemostatic responses. This behavior was pronounced for nitrate and less so for phosphate and atrazine. The analysis suggests that biogeochemical inputs built up legacy loads, leading to the emergence of chemostatic behavior at annual time scales, even at the relatively small scale of the LVR.

A long-term water quality monitoring program was established to evaluate the effects of agricultural management practices on water quality in the Little Vermilion River (LVR) watershed, IL. This watershed has intensive random and irregular subsurface drainage systems. The objective of this study was to assess the fate and transport of soluble phosphorus (soluble P) through subsurface drainage and surface runoff. Four sites (sites A, B, C, and E) that had subsurface and surface monitoring programs were selected for this study. Three of the four study sites had corn (Zea mays L.) and soybeans (Glycine max L.) planted in rotations and the other site had seed corn and soybeans. Subsurface drainage and surface runoff across all sites removed an average of 16.1 and 2.6% of rainfall, respectively. Annual flow-weighted soluble P concentrations fluctuated with the precipitation, while concentrations tended to increase with high precipitation coupled with high application rates. The long-term average flow-weighted soluble P concentrations in subsurface flow were 102, 99, 194, and 86 microg L(-1) for sites A, B, C, and E, respectively. In contrast, the long-term average flow-weighted soluble P concentrations in surface runoff were 270, 253, 534, and 572 microg L(-1) for sites As, Bs, Cs, and Es, respectively. These values were substantially greater than the critical values that promote eutrophication. Statistical analysis indicated that the effects of crop, discharge, and the interactions between site and discharge and crop and discharge on soluble P concentrations in subsurface flow were significant (alpha = 0.05). Soluble P mass loads in surface runoff responded to discharge more consistently than in the subsurface flow. Subsurface flow had substantially greater annual average soluble P mass loads than surface runoff due to greater flow volume.

Cholesterol oxidase (ChOx) physisorbed onto NiO nanoparticles (nNiO, 22 nm)— chitosan (CHIT) film prepared using coprecipitation method has been characterized using x-ray diffraction, Fourier transform infrared, scanning electron microscopy, cyclic voltammetry, and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy techniques. The results of electrochemical response studies conducted on ChOx/nan-NiO-CHIT/ITO bioelectrode show linearity of 10–400 mg/dl, detection limit of 43.4 mg/dl, sensitivity of 0.808 μA/(mg dl cm2), fast response time of 15 s, and shelf-life of about 10 weeks. The low value of Michaelis–Menten constant (Km) obtained as 0.67 mM indicates high affinity of ChOx toward the substrate.

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