Sludge-handling issues, tightening global regulations for sludge disposal, fuel price spikes, shrinking fossil fuel reserves owing to rising energy demands, climate change concerns, and public awareness are the drivers prompting increased interest in environmental engineers and scientists extracting value-added crops from sludge.
To provide value-added crops, new products from crops are being developed.
Additionally, when considering oil production for cooking and fuels, peanut represents one of the highest value-added crops, with an annual worth of $1 billion to farmers and $6 billion to the overall economy in the U.S. alone.
Shame: better farming techniques could bring unproductive land into use and help Africa shift into higher-value-added crops.
Transgenics - the use of genetic engineering to introduce genetic information across species - will be critical to near-term adaptation of food crops for biofuels production by, for instance, improving yields and processability for starches and oils, affecting value-added changes in crop composition, or improving stress tolerance to assure more predictable biomass streams for processing.
Thus, rosin is a promising source of a value-added product for crop protection.
The advancement of plant genetic engineering has led to more sophisticated techniques and strategies being utilized for value added crop production.
"A lot of what we've learned about vegetable marketing and production, value-added wheat and other crops can be applied to peanuts," Culbreath said.
Rather, it's finding innovative ways to help subsistence and small acreage farmers utilize their land to its fullest economic and social potential by connecting them to specialty crops; to value-added processing technologies; to knowledge resources on cultivation, consumption, and processing of these crops; and to buyers in the global market.
Metabolic engineering of plants with enhanced crop yield and value-added compositional traits is particularly challenging as they probably exhibit the highest metabolic network complexity of all living organisms.
