Awareness and Adoption of Good Agricultural Practices among Smallholder Farmers in relation to the Adopted Villages programme: The Case Study of Northern Nigeria

This study assesses smallholder level of awareness and uptake of good agricultural practices (GAPs) that were initiated by the National Agricultural Extension and Research Liaison Services (NAERLS) in Nigeria; a programme to enhance the agricultural productivity and income of participants. This study engaged with 120 smallholder farmers and their extension officer and data were collected via structured face-to-face and livelihood questionnaires and then analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. The findings show that 82% of participants were aware of the specific GAPs covered by the NAERLS programme. Despite this, the majority of respondents were not practicing these. Participants identified numerous challenges to GAPs implementation, including; unreliable and inadequate rainfall; lack of farm inputs; high cost of farm inputs; lack of technical know-how; lack of irrigation facilities and high illiteracy.  The study also shows that the level of awareness of GAPs among farmers in the study areas has a statistically significant impact on the productivity and livelihoods of smallholders.  These initial results strongly suggest that the Nigerian government should provide funds to support NAERLS in order to intensify its intervention efforts.  In the same vein, NGOs, rural developers, policy makers and government at all levels should be encouraged to provide farm inputs and credit facilities to farming communities to offset the high costs of inputs. Keywords: Good Agricultural Practices, Awareness. DOI: 10.7176/JBAH/10-6-06 Publication date:March 31st 202

Development of MY FRAM matrix to assess food safety risks in horticultural crops

A farm food safety risk assessment matrix (MY FRAM) was developed for horticultural farms. The tool enables farmers to carry out self risk assessments on the potential of food safety risks on the farm from site selection to post-harvest handling. MY FRAM was developed on Microsoft ASP. NET C# 4.5 with logical functions and utilised a semi-quantitative risk assessment approach (risk ranking of 1 – 9) for farmers. MY FRAM is an illustrative risk ranking tool to allow farmers to quickly identify potential food safety risks and risk summary and corrective actions are suggested to farms on how to reduce the risks. The tool can also be utilised as a training tool for farm workers to understand the importance of food safety at the farm level

Effects of gamma irradiation on the shelf-life of a dairy-like product

his study was aimed to assess the effect of irradiation on the shelf-life of pseudo-dairy food product consisting of different concentration levels of the structural and energy-giving caloric component macronutrients (protein, fat and carbohydrate). Gamma irradiated products (1 kGy, 3 kGy, 5 kGy and 10 kGy) were compared to the current procedure used by the industry of non-irradiated dairy products. The study looked at the impact of different treatments on storage quality in respect to physicochemical (pH, acidity, macronutrients), and microbiological properties [total viable count (TVC)]. The products were aseptically packaged in plastic containers and analysed at regular weekly intervals up until 100 days during refrigerated storage at 4 ± 1 °C. The storage period did not bring about any significant change in physicochemical properties of the products throughout the period of study while the TVC displayed a linear regression for irradiated products stored at 4 ± 1 °C as well as the control (non-irradiated). At the end of the shelf-life trial (benchmarked at log 4.3 CFU/g), the total viable count did not exceed log 3.94 CFU/g for samples treated at 10 kGy after 100 days of analysis. These observations indicated that the product could be safely stored aerobically for > 100days (10 and 5 kGy), 56days at (3 kGy), 42 days at (1 kGy) for the irradiated samples' and 14–28 days for the non-irradiated samples without much change in physicochemical and microbiological properties using refrigerated storage

The Christiansen Effect in Saturn's narrow dusty rings and the spectral identification of clumps in the F ring

Stellar occultations by Saturn's rings observed with the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) onboard the Cassini spacecraft reveal that dusty features such as the F ring and the ringlets in the Encke and the Laplace Gaps have distinctive infrared transmission spectra. These spectra show a narrow optical depth minimum at wavelengths around 2.87 microns. This minimum is likely due to the Christiansen Effect, a reduction in the extinction of small particles when their (complex) refractive index is close to that of the surrounding medium. Simple Mie-scattering models demonstrate that the strength of this opacity dip is sensitive to the size distribution of particles between 1 and 100 microns across. Furthermore, the spatial resolution of the occultation data is sufficient to reveal variations in the transmission spectra within and among these rings. For example, in both the Encke Gap ringlets and F ring, the opacity dip weakens with increasing local optical depth, which is consistent with the larger particles being concentrated near the cores of these rings. The strength of the opacity dip varies most dramatically within the F ring; certain compact regions of enhanced optical depth lack an opacity dip and therefore appear to have a greatly reduced fraction of grains in the few-micron size range.Such spectrally-identifiable structures probably represent a subset of the compact optically-thick clumps observed by other Cassini instruments. These variations in the ring's particle size distribution can provide new insights into the processes of grain aggregation, disruption and transport within dusty rings. For example, the unusual spectral properties of the F-ring clumps could perhaps be ascribed to small grains adhering onto the surface of larger particles in regions of anomalously low velocity dispersion.Comment: 42 pages, 15 figures, accepted for publication in Icarus. A few small typographical errors fixed to match correction in proof

Geomorphological significance of Ontario Lacus on Titan: Integrated interpretation of Cassini VIMS, ISS and RADAR data and comparison with the Etosha Pan (Namibia)

International audienceOntario Lacus is the largest lake of the whole southern hemisphere of Titan, Saturn's major moon. It has been imaged twice by each of the Cassini imaging systems (Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS) in 2004 and 2005, Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) in 2007 and 2009 and Radar in 2009 and 2010). In this study, we take advantage of each imaging dataset to establish a global survey of Ontario Lacus' environment from 2005 to 2010. We perform a geomorphological mapping and interpretation of Ontario Lacus, mainly based on a joint analysis of VIMS and Radar SAR datasets, along with the T49 altimetric profile acquired in December 2008. The morphologies observed on Ontario Lacus are compared to landforms of a semi-arid terrestrial analog, which closely resembles Titan's lakes: the pans of the Etosha Basin, located in Namibia. From this comparison, we infer that Ontario Lacus is an extremely flat depression where liquids, only located in the darkest areas in the Radar data, cover topographic lows where the "alkanofer" would raise above the depression floor. The rest of the depression appears rather as a muddy flat surface likely composed of a thick coating of photon-absorbing materials, explaining its still rather dark appearance in the infrared and radar data. We also determined whether surface changes occurred during the 5 years time interval between 2005 and 2010. We found that the depression contour is constant at the resolution of ISS and VIMS data, both being consistent with the depression contour derived from the Radar data. Our interpretation, in which the liquids are located only in some parts of Ontario Lacus, agrees with the lack of significant change of the depression contour between 2007 (and 2005 with more uncertainties) and 2010

Occultation observations of Saturn's rings with Cassini VIMS

We describe the prediction, design, execution and calibration of stellar and solar occultation observations of Saturn's rings by the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) instrument on the Cassini spacecraft. Particular attention is paid to the technique developed for onboard acquisition of the stellar target and to the geometric and photometric calibration of the data. Examples of both stellar and solar occultation data are presented, highlighting several aspects of the data as well as the different occultation geometries encountered during Cassini's 13-year orbital tour. Complete catalogs of ring stellar and solar occultations observed by Cassini-VIMS are presented, as a guide to the standard data sets which have been delivered to the Planetary Data System's Ring Moon Systems Node (Hedman and Nicholson, 2019b)

Saturn's icy satellites and rings investigated by Cassini - VIMS. III. Radial compositional variability

In the last few years Cassini-VIMS, the Visible and Infared Mapping Spectrometer, returned to us a comprehensive view of the Saturn's icy satellites and rings. After having analyzed the satellites' spectral properties (Filacchione et al. (2007a)) and their distribution across the satellites' hemispheres (Filacchione et al. (2010)), we proceed in this paper to investigate the radial variability of icy satellites (principal and minor) and main rings average spectral properties. This analysis is done by using 2,264 disk-integrated observations of the satellites and a 12x700 pixels-wide rings radial mosaic acquired with a spatial resolution of about 125 km/pixel. The comparative analysis of these data allows us to retrieve the amount of both water ice and red contaminant materials distributed across Saturn's system and the typical surface regolith grain sizes. These measurements highlight very striking differences in the population here analyzed, which vary from the almost uncontaminated and water ice-rich surfaces of Enceladus and Calypso to the metal/organic-rich and red surfaces of Iapetus' leading hemisphere and Phoebe. Rings spectra appear more red than the icy satellites in the visible range but show more intense 1.5-2.0 micron band depths. The correlations among spectral slopes, band depths, visual albedo and phase permit us to cluster the saturnian population in different spectral classes which are detected not only among the principal satellites and rings but among co-orbital minor moons as well. Finally, we have applied Hapke's theory to retrieve the best spectral fits to Saturn's inner regular satellites using the same methodology applied previously for Rhea data discussed in Ciarniello et al. (2011).Comment: 44 pages, 27 figures, 7 tables. Submitted to Icaru

Search for direct production of charginos and neutralinos in events with three leptons and missing transverse momentum in √s = 7 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for the direct production of charginos and neutralinos in final states with three electrons or muons and missing transverse momentum is presented. The analysis is based on 4.7 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data delivered by the Large Hadron Collider and recorded with the ATLAS detector. Observations are consistent with Standard Model expectations in three signal regions that are either depleted or enriched in Z-boson decays. Upper limits at 95% confidence level are set in R-parity conserving phenomenological minimal supersymmetric models and in simplified models, significantly extending previous results

Jet size dependence of single jet suppression in lead-lead collisions at sqrt(s(NN)) = 2.76 TeV with the ATLAS detector at the LHC

Measurements of inclusive jet suppression in heavy ion collisions at the LHC provide direct sensitivity to the physics of jet quenching. In a sample of lead-lead collisions at sqrt(s) = 2.76 TeV corresponding to an integrated luminosity of approximately 7 inverse microbarns, ATLAS has measured jets with a calorimeter over the pseudorapidity interval |eta| < 2.1 and over the transverse momentum range 38 < pT < 210 GeV. Jets were reconstructed using the anti-kt algorithm with values for the distance parameter that determines the nominal jet radius of R = 0.2, 0.3, 0.4 and 0.5. The centrality dependence of the jet yield is characterized by the jet "central-to-peripheral ratio," Rcp. Jet production is found to be suppressed by approximately a factor of two in the 10% most central collisions relative to peripheral collisions. Rcp varies smoothly with centrality as characterized by the number of participating nucleons. The observed suppression is only weakly dependent on jet radius and transverse momentum. These results provide the first direct measurement of inclusive jet suppression in heavy ion collisions and complement previous measurements of dijet transverse energy imbalance at the LHC.Comment: 15 pages plus author list (30 pages total), 8 figures, 2 tables, submitted to Physics Letters B. All figures including auxiliary figures are available at http://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/PHYSICS/PAPERS/HION-2011-02