New rapid blood test for the detection of Bovine TB.

A new blood test to detect Mycobacteria in blood has been developed by researchers. The scientists have used this new method to show that cattle diagnosed with bovine tuberculosis (bTB) have detectable levels of the bacterium Mycobacterium bovis (M. bovis) in their blood which causes this disease. The routine test for Bovine TB uses the Single Intradermal Comparative Cervical Tuberculin (SICCT) skin test for M. bovis infection and all healthy cattle are regularly tested this way. However, it is known that this test is only 90 per cent sensitive at best and misses many infected animals. This has prompted the need for better techniques to prevent false negatives during testing. Many countries are suffering the scourge of the disease not only because of economic loss but because of zoonotic nature of disease. The team from the University of Nottingham led by Dr Cath Rees, an expert in microbiology in the School of Biosciences and Dr Ben Swift from the School of Veterinary Medicine and Science.The result published has been published online in the peer reviewed medical journal Virulence shows evidence of Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex bacteraemia in intradermal skin test positive cattle detected using phage-RPA. This new, simple and inexpensive blood test detects very low levels of mycobacteria in blood using a bacteriophage-based technique developed by The University of Nottingham. The group has patented an improved version of the method that delivers results in just six hours. More recently 'proof of principal' experiments have shown that this is even more sensitive. This is currently licensed to a spin out company, PBD Biotech Ltd.

Urban Agriculture : Cricket farming is the latest money code.

The art of insect rearing for commercial purposes originated from the Netherlands, but has now spread to different parts of the world including Africa.. Crickets are black or brown insects that belong to the class insecta, order Orthoptera and genus Acheta. They are categorized into two groups; house cricket and field cricket. These creatures are the latest money code in agriculture.

Crickets is independent of climate change. Farmers are able to rear them throughout the year and thus their profitability is ensured. This cheap startup has found its share in urban agriculture,the crickets can be raised in-house,outdoors in bucket,crates or bowls. The relative ease of raising these creatures coupled with the health benefits derived has made the cricket ,food of the future. Crickets have a higher feed conversion ratio converting most of their feed into protein. The insect has a high protein value an advantage that is tapped in area of malnutrition. Crickets are a rich source of fats, especially the polyunsaturated fatty acids ,they also contain minerals such as iron and zinc. Crickets can be used directly as food or ground into flour to fortify other foods. 

Cricket flour can be used as an ingredient to make products such as biscuits, cakes, porridge, chapati and mandazi. For example cricket farmers in Bondo have been incorporating cricket flour to make different confectioneries. Farmers in Kenya utilize buckets where female adults lay fertilized eggs under a wet cotton wool. After a month, the eggs hatch into nymphs that feed on vegetables, soy flour and water.It takes three months for crickets to mature into adult stage. An adult cricket weighs about 0.5- 1.5grammes. 

 Harvesting of the mature crickets is by emptying into boiling water for about 5 minutes. These are then cooled in cold water before being dried in a solar drier to a moisture content of below five per cent. This reduces the growth of bacteria and molds, making them have an extended shelf-life and safe for human consumption. MORE

Crickets as future protein source for poultry and pigs.

Insect farming is considered more sustainable than traditional livestock. They are coldblooded and are efficient at converting food into protein. 

 They require 12 times less feed than cattle, four times less feed than sheep, and half as much feed as pigs and broiler chickens to produce the same amount of protein, according to a 2013 United Nations report examining insects' potential as human food. 

Insects are reported to emit fewer greenhouse gases and less ammonia than cattle or pigs, and they require significantly less land and water than cattle rearing.  

 Crickets require 8 percent of the water it takes for cows to produce a similar amount of protein,and critters emit 1 percent of the greenhouse gases of cows. The protein content the crickets deliver's is 15 percent more ,and has an iron content than spinach and as much vitamin B-12 as salmon. 

Crickets as protein source for pigs and poultry.

Crickets as edible food.

The business is fast gaining popularity because of the low capital startup, rapid and high return of investment and the relative ease of production. Iowa resident begins cricket farming for human consumption,she

Wealth creation through fingerling production.

Fingerling production in cat fish farming is an essential part of the farm operation because it is the seed needed for production.The Clarias gariepinus spp is the common cat fish reared in Nigeria because of its early maturity taste,and the fact that it has an accessory breathing organ hence can survive outside water for some hrs,this explains why its sold live in the open markets. The mature male and female brood stock are chosen and kept in separate tubs,one male can fertilize 10 females.The males are bigger and heavier than the females,weighing over 1kg is the ideal .The males must have well developed genitals that are reddish indicating maturity. The females to be used must be identified as good spawners,with a weight of 450-500g,and must be over 8months with dark golden green eggs. The females are usually injected with hormones,the eggs expressed and mixed with milt of the male catfish.The male catfish is killed to extract the milt while the female is returned to pond after eggs are expressed. There are various hormones used in stimulating ovulation in fish such as ova prim, human chorionic gonadotropin, crushed pituitary gland and a combination of motilium and suprefact. The materials needed for the spawning include; a glass trough or a bath tub with water inlet and outlet pipes, screen with stand, pumps,bowls and net covering to keep tank covered and dark.The method you intend to use will dictate materials you will put in place. The The money making potential is enormous and so many farmers are into hatchery business and smiling to the bank. Jane Waruinge, the proprietor of Jasa Fish Farm left America to set up an hatchery business. Jane only keeps a few mature fish for brooding, seeing as her venture mainly deals in fingerling,She shipped in the brooders, with her monosex tilapia coming mainly from UK, and the gold fish and catfish coming from Jambo Fish Farm in Kiambu. Her aquaculture farm now boasts of three types of fish fingerlings (tilapia, catfish and gold fish), with her specialty being in monosex male tilapia fingerlings.She pumped Sh3.5million into the development of her two plots, bought and erected the hatcheries, built the ponds and put up other numerous essential structures. The environment of the hatchery and ponds has to be kept at a constant temperature of 24-28 degrees centigrade and anything much lower or higher than that could prove disastrous to the fingerlings. More

Fighting poachers with smart apps.

A new smartphone app developed in St Petersburg in Florida, USA is being used to fight poachers in northern Kenya. Fulcrum whose use was perfected by municipalities and businesses to collect forms and field data is now being used to track down the location of elephants and ivory smugglers by sharing the information quickly with game rangers before poachers strike. The initiative, tenBoma, is a counter-poaching initiative being piloted by the non-governmental International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) and the Kenya Wildlife Service designed to protect the most endangered Kenyan wildlife by identifying, mapping, and destroying poaching networks “IFAW’s tenBoma project is taking the lessons learned from counter-terrorism and applying them to wildlife protection. Fulcrum is a powerful new weapon being used in the battle to destroy poaching. Fulcrum tracks the location of elephant poachers helping game rangers to plan their patrols. Where any security threat is detected, it is promptly shared out for effective response from ground and air surveillance. The patrols use Fulcrum-equipped smartphones, and they traverse the plains looking for poachers and plot their observations on a real-time map shared with authorities and game rangers. The information is then used to form essential data analysis which is shared out with local law enforcement and communities in the affected area The work of the Fulcrum team on the tenBoma initiative is recognized worldwide as a model for combating the effects of illegal wildlife trafficking on global security

Technology Is Making Huge Changes In The World Of Agriculture.

FORBES held its second AgTech Summit, showing off the varieties of technologies that are changing the future of farming, from big data to robots to satellites to machine learning to benevolent fungi. Julie Borlaug, the granddaughter of Nobel Peace Prize-winner Norman Borlaug, who’s carrying on the family legacy by pushing innovation in agriculture to ensure we can feed the future. Kim Nicholson, the VP of Business Development for Spensa Technologies. They manufacture the “Z-Trap,” a device that replaces the painstaking work of estimating pest populations by hand with real-time data. The Z-trap is capable of not only collecting bugs, but it zaps them with electricity in a way that allows the species of bug to be identified, making it much more efficient for farmers to control pests in their fields. more

Stem cell breakthrough restores eyesight in blind rabbits.

Scientists have been able to restore vision in blind rabbits by creating eye tissue from human stem cells, a development that could lead to human trials to help restore vision within the next two years. Researchers from the Cardiff University and Osaka University in Japan collaborated to grow multiple different cells similar to those found in the eye. Cells they created to be similar to cells in the cornea were able to surgically repair the front of the eye in the blind rabbits. The scientists behind the work say the breakthrough could lead to clinical human trials of anterior eye transplantation to restore loss of damaged vision. Andrew Quantock from Cardiff University, who coauthored the work, explained that the research published in the journal Nature shows that human stem cells are able to take on the characteristics of the cornea, lens and retina. "We've been using human iPS cells -- which are induced pluripotent stem cells -- growing them in a 2D culture dish. Spontaneously the cells, after several weeks, created four zones on their own," Quantock told WIRED. "Each zone has the molecular characteristics of a different part of the eye." "We took cells from the third zone, which most looks like the corneal epithelium, and grew those further out before transferring them onto the animal model, which was functional and worked." The scientists were able to show that the corneal cells could be cultivated and transplanted onto the eyes of "rabbits with experimentally induced blindness" to repair the front of the eye. At present 4,000 corneal grafts are performed by the NHS each year. However these rely on human organ donation, although some human patients in the UK have received stem cell treatments to save their eyesight.More