Preliminary evaluation of perennial forage legumes for organic farming in Finland

In 1998-2001 fourteen forage legume species were evaluated for their productivity in mixed organic swards. The aim was to find new alternatives for red clover. Medicago falcata produced the highest dry matter yield (about 11 000 kg/ha/year). Dry matter production of Trifolium pratense, Trifolium hybridum and Medicago sativa varied from 2 200 to 10 600 kg/ha/year

Preliminary evaluation of annually cultivated forage legumes for organic farming in Finland

In 1998-2001 nineteen forage legume species (Lupinus, Medicago, Melilotus, Pisum, Trifolium and Vicia species) were evaluated at two sites of Eastern Finland (Mikkeli and Juva). Species were studied for their annual productivity in pure stands and in mixtures with cereals (barley and oats) and Italian ryegrass. Swards were cut either twice or once (whole grain silage stage of barley)

Management of red clover content of organic grassland

The clover content is an important factor in organic grassland management to optimize yield, feeding value and pre-crop effect of the ley. The variation of red clover (Trifolium pratense) content in swards of different age is often rather high in Finland. In the ongoing field experiment (1999-2002) staggered sowing of red clover seed was tested to regulate the clover content of the mixed sward. Sowing strategy did not have clear effect on the clover content or the yield of the sward. However the seeding rate affected the clover density of the field (plants/m²) in the first year. After two years the differences were equated. The best strategy to control the clover amount in the mixed swards seems sowing of 2 or 3 kg/ha (100 or 150 seeds/m²) clover seeds in establishment and then oversow on a first second ley year 1 or 2 kg/ha (50 or 100 seeds/m²)

Clover content and yield of swards on organic farms - maintenance and estimation

Grassland production based on legumes is an essential part of the productivity and economy of the organic farming systems. The clover content is an important factor in organic grassland management to optimize the yield, feed value and pre-crop effect of ley. The ley yield and clover content of one-, two- and three-year-old leys were determined on eight organic farms in 1998. Two-year-old leys produced the highest (6500 kg/ha dm) and three-year-old leys (4900 kg/ha dm) the lowest yields, with no significant differences between one- and two-year-old leys. The clover content (20-80 % of dm) diminished to the same extent as the yields. Because the ley samples from the organic farms gave strong evidence of decreasing yield level and clover content in the 3-year-old leys, we started to develop a technique to maintain the ley productivity in older swards. This technique includes oversowing of clover in the spring of the second ley year and utilization of lime-pelleted, pre-inoculated seed. Lime-pelleted, pre-inoculated clover seed oversown at different times in spring were compared with the aim of developing an oversowing method for Finnish conditions. The preliminary results do not show any differences, but studies are ongoing

Comparison of NIRS based methods to determine legume content of mixed swards

Four established and two new NIRS calibrations for the determination of legume content in dry ground mixtures were used to estimate clover content in ten Finnish red clover-grass mixtures of known legume content

A novel hybrid recommendation system for library book selection

Abstract. Increasing number of books published in a year and decreasing budgets have made collection development increasingly difficult in libraries. Despite the data to help decision making being available in the library systems, the librarians have little means to utilize the data. In addition, modern key technologies, such as machine learning, that generate more value out data have not yet been utilized in the field of libraries to their full extent. This study was set to discover a way to build a recommendation system that could help librarians who are struggling with book selection process. This thesis proposed a novel hybrid recommendation system for library book selection. The data used to build the system consisted of book metadata and book circulation data of books located in Joensuu City Library’s adult fiction collection. The proposed system was based on both rule-based components and a machine learning model. The user interface for the system was build using web technologies so that the system could be used via using web browser. The proposed recommendation system was evaluated using two different methods: automated tests and focus group methodology. The system achieved an accuracy of 79.79% and F1 score of 0.86 in automated tests. Uncertainty rate of the system was 27.87%. With these results in automated tests, the proposed system outperformed baseline machine learning models. The main suggestions that were gathered from focus group evaluation were that while the proposed system was found interesting, librarians thought it would need more features and configurability in order to be usable in real world scenarios. Results indicate that making good quality recommendations using book metadata is challenging because the data is high dimensional categorical data by its nature. Main implications of the results are that recommendation systems in domain of library collection development should focus on data pre-processing and feature engineering. Further investigation is suggested to be carried out regarding knowledge representation

Specialisation through co-operation between farms in organic farming

Co-operation in organic production provides the potential for production specialisation with the help of co-operation in machinery use, input integration, crop rotation, shared buildings and marketing. Co-operation models provide the opportunity to optimise production between different lines of production from environmental, economic and functional perspectives

Biomass production and feeding value of whole-crop cereal-legume-silages

In eastern Finland, several mixtures of spring wheat, spring barley, spring oats and/or rye with vetches and/or peas were evaluated in field experiments in 2005-2007 for their dry matter procuction, crude protein concentration and digestibility using three different harvesting times

Mitigating the measurement overhead of ADAPT-VQE with optimised informationally complete generalised measurements

ADAPT-VQE stands out as a robust algorithm for constructing compact ans\"atze for molecular simulation. It enables to significantly reduce the circuit depth with respect to other methods, such as UCCSD, while achieving higher accuracy and not suffering from so-called barren plateaus that hinder the variational optimisation of many hardware-efficient ans\"atze. In its standard implementation, however, it introduces a considerable measurement overhead in the form of gradient evaluations trough estimations of many commutator operators. In this work, we mitigate this measurement overhead by exploiting a recently introduced method for energy evaluation relying on Adaptive Informationally complete generalised Measurements (AIM). Besides offering an efficient way to measure the energy itself, Informationally Complete (IC) measurement data can be reused to estimate all the commutators of the operators in the operator pool of ADAPT-VQE, using only classically efficient post-processing. We present the AIM-ADAPT-VQE scheme in detail, and investigate its performance with several H4 Hamiltonians and operator pools. Our numerical simulations indicate that the measurement data obtained to evaluate the energy can be reused to implement ADAPT-VQE with no additional measurement overhead for the systems considered here. In addition, we show that, if the energy is measured within chemical precision, the CNOT count in the resulting circuits is close to the ideal one. With scarce measurement data, AIM-ADAPT-VQE still converges to the ground state with high probability, albeit with an increased circuit depth in some cases

Effect of Donor Simvastatin Treatment on Gene Expression Profiles in Human Cardiac Allografts during Ischemia-Reperfusion Injury

Purpose Numerous studies have shown that statin therapy initiated early after heart transplantation has beneficial effects on the development of cardiac allograft vasculopathy. Recently, we were able to show in a randomized clinical trial that simvastatin treatment of brain-dead donors conditions the heart transplant to withstand ischemia-reperfusion injury and to reduce the need for rejection treatments early after transplantation. In this study, we analyzed myocardial gene expression profiles in cardiac allografts after donor simvastatin treatment. Methods 84 heart transplant donors received 80 mg of simvastatin via nasogastric tube (n=42), or no treatment (n=42) in a prospective, double-blinded randomized controlled trial. Transmural Tru-Cut biopsies were taken from the apex of left ventricle of the donor heart immediately before reperfusion and 1 hour after reperfusion. 20 heart biopsies from donors without treatment and 20 heart biopsies from donors with simvastatin treatment will be analyzed with RNA sequencing. Results The preliminary analysis of RNA sequencing data from myocardial biopsies revealed altogether 137 significantly differentially expressed genes in all pairwise comparisons. The overall biological functions of these genes were related to gene ontology terms such as response to toxic substance, leukocyte migration, neutrophil mediated immunity, response to lipopolysaccharide, and response to oxidative stress. At the KEGG pathway level, our results indicated alterations in IL-17, TNF, MAPK and the AGE-RAGE signaling pathways. Conclusion We have shown in previous studies that donor simvastatin treatment induces protective effects against IRI in heart transplant recipients. In this study, we were able to detect significantly differentially expressed genes related to effects of simvastatin treatment. In order to single out genes that show beneficial effects of simvastatin treatment, further analysis will be conducted by exploring gene expression changes in specific biological functional categories, such as interleukin signaling and neutrophil degranulation. The complete analysis will be presented at the ISHLT 2019 congress.Peer reviewe