After the success of the Green Revolution in conquering famine in India, Pakistan and elsewhere in Asia in the 1960s, the world entered a prolonged period of plentiful and cheap food. As documented by Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman in their book Enough: Why the World’s Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty, this abundance shifted attention away from further agricultural development, particularly fo...

Introduction Research at CLIMA has indicated that Lathyrus cicera and L. sativus (grasspea) have potential as grain legumes on 100 000 to 300 000 ha of neutral to alkaline soils in low-to-medium rainfall areas of southern Australia. They do not have serious disease problems and are envisaged as low maintenance/low cost crops for the purposes of green manure, managing herbicide resistant weeds, ...

Marine algae contain large amounts of polysaccharides, notably cell wall structural, but also mycopolysaccharides and storage polysaccharides (Kumar et al. 2008b; Murata and Nakazoe 2001). Polysaccharides are polymers of simple sugars (monosaccharides) linked together by glycosidic bonds, and they have numerous commercial applications in products such as stabilisers, thickeners, emulsifiers, fo...

Naïve hawkmoths (Manduca sexta) learn from a single trial to approach and attempt to feed from an artificial flower of an innately unpreferred green colour even when a distractor flower with a preferred yellow colour is present. In some of the animals, the choice of the innately unpreferred colour during free-flight testing persists for several days despite not being rewarded and eventually lea...

Feed forward neural networks (FFNN) with an unconstrained random number of hidden neurons deene exible non-parametric regression models. In M uller and Rios Insua (1998) we have argued that variable architecture models with random size hidden layer signiicantly reduce posterior mul-timodality typical for posterior distributions in neural network models. In this chapter we review the model propo...

The use of antibiotic growth promoters has been questioned in Europe for several decades. The concern has mainly been related to the risk of creating antibiotic resistant microorganisms that can be transferred to humans. The ethical justification for feeding antibiotics to ‘‘healthy animals’’ has been debated as well and during the last decade, the growing consumer demand for ‘‘green’’ food pro...

A new species, Haplothrips heliotropica, is described from Argentina causing severe damage to the leaves of Heliotropium amplexicaule (Boraginaceae), a South American plant that is now a serious weed of pastures in Australia. Observations are presented on the host specificity, seasonal population changes and overwintering of this thrips. The genus Haplothrips includes more than 230 species worl...

Materials and methods: A total of 54 sows and their litters were assigned to three treatments: rotary feeder with hopper, rotary feeder without hopper, and pan feeder. A creep diet with 1.0% chromic oxide was offered ad libitum from Day 18 until weaning (Day 21). Fecal samples were collected from piglets with sterile swabs 3 to 12 hours before weaning. Piglets were categorized as “eaters” when ...