Soft-hard interplay and factorization for baryon production in the target fragmentation region in ep collisions

We discuss baryon production in the nucleon fragmentation region in deep inelastic scattering. The dependence of the nucleon spectra on Bjorken-$x$ is evaluated within the parton model and in QCD, and ways to look for the break-down of the DGLAP approximation via baryon production are suggested. We argue also that the leading neutron production in these small $x$ processes is rather insensitive to the pion parton densities of the nucleon.Comment: 13 pages, LaTeX, 2 Postscript figures; Final version to appear in Phys. Lett.