Coastal sandy soil is characterised by low fertility and poor physical properties. Distillery effluent, a liquid waste from the distillery industry contains large quantities of soluble organic matter and plant nutrients. It does not contain any toxic elements / compounds. In order to improve the physical properties and fertility of the coastal soil by utilising the distillery effluent, field ex...

Evapotranspiration (E,) was estimated for plant, first ratoon and second ratoon crops in a sugarcane field by means of the water balance in a large plastic-lined lysimeter (405 m2) and three small weighed lysimeters (each 3,71 m2). For the first 230 days of the plant crop of the experiment the mean daily estimates of E , from the large and small lysimeters were 4,14 mm and 4,16 mm respectively....

Model reuse can be limited by software design, which often forces third parties to completely rewrite new versions of existing models before adapting them to new needs. This tendency removes resources from the development and improvement of models, and from the extension of their domain, leading to the proliferation of software having many different implementations of the same algorithms. A com...

Sugarcane bagasse is an important lignocellulosic material studied for the production of xylooligosaccharides (XOS). Some XOS are considered soluble dietary fibre, with low caloric value and prebiotic effect, but they are expensive and not easily available. In a screening of 138 fungi, only nine were shortlisted, and just Aspergillus fumigatus M51 (35.6 U/mL) and A. fumigatus U2370 (28.5 U/mL) ...

This study evaluated the influence of variety type on dilute acid pretreatment and enzymatic hydrolysis responses in terms of xylose, glucose and total combined sugar yields of eight varieties of sugarcane bagasse. The pretreatment was carried out in small tubular reactors. The materials were pretreated under five different conditions and hydrolysed with a standard enzyme dosage (15 FPU/g water...

The present work highlighted the production of violacein by the locally isolated Chromobacterium violaceum (GenBank accession no. HM132057) in various agricultural waste materials (sugarcane bagasse, solid pineapple waste, molasses, brown sugar), as an alternative to the conventional rich medium. The highest yield for pigment production (0.82 g L⁻¹) was obtained using free cells when grown in 3...

A review of nitrogen (N) fertiliser management in the Australian sugar industry was undertaken to identify new strategies to improve N fertiliser use efficiency and to fill gaps in knowledge relevant to N fertiliser management. The Australian sugar industry has a history of high N fertiliser usage, with applications increasing from the 1960s to the late 1990s. However, industry average sugarcan...