Agro-Product Processing Technology

Principles and Practice

B K Bala

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138596689
• eBook ISBN: 9780429946127
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Biology
• Index: Business

Global food security is a challenging issue. Meeting the food and nutritional requirements of the world has become an issue for national policymakers and is of public concern. There is a need to enhance agricultural production, as well as, to reduce postharvest loss, improve the quality of processed products, and add value to products to make more quality food available. Agro-product processing technology plays a major role to reduce post-harvest losses, improve the quality of processed products, and add value to the products. It also generates employment and ultimately contributes to food security.

Features:

• Covers a wide spectrum of agro-product processing technology
• Explains the principles and practices of agro-product processing technology with many worked examples to quickly teach the basic principles through examples
• Contains examples from different operations on current problems to show the wide applications of the principles of agro-product technology
• Includes process control and emerging technologies in agro-product processing such as energy and exergy analysis, neural network modeling, and CFD modeling

This book deals with physical and thermal properties, cleaning and sorting, drying and storage, parboiling and milling, by-product utilization, heating and cooling, refrigerated cooling, and cold storage. The most unique feature of this book is the machine vision for grading fruits, process control and materials handling, and emerging technologies such as neural network, finite element, CFD, and genetic algorithm.

1	Introduction

This chapter introduces the concepts of agricultural engineering and agro-product processing technology and their importance, postharvest losses, and postharvest technology. Postharvest losses include weight loss, nutritional loss, viability loss, and indirect loss. Selection of unit operations and management of postharvest technology using a systems approach for production of high-quality, value-added products are also presented.

1.1 INTRODUCTION

Global food security is a challenging issue to meet the food and nutritional requirements and has become an issue of national policy and public concern (Majumder et al., 2016). Cereal grains, fruits, and vegetables are the major food crops to meet energy and nutritional requirements of the growing population of the world. We need to enhance agricultural production as well as to reduce the postharvest loss, improve the quality of the processed products, and add value to the products to make more quality food available. We need nutritional quality food available for consumption and sale, not the production statistics. This demands application of engineering principles to agriculture at large to ensure higher production and fewer losses and better quality thus making more quality food available. Agro-product processing technology plays the major role to reduce the postharvest losses, improve the quality of the processed products, and hence add value to the products. Essentially, it starts at harvesting and involves the primary postharvest operations such as cleaning, grading, sorting, drying, parboiling, milling, packaging, and storage and continues until consumption. This also would generate employment and hence ultimately would contribute to food security.

Southeast Asia and South Asia witnessed the green revolution in the late sixties on account of adoption of improved seeds and packages of other inputs in conjunction with irrigation that resulted in increased productivity. This was followed by a quantum jump in the production of fruits, vegetables, milk, egg, fish, and meat—thus changing the production scenario of this region.

Although there have been some problems of equitable distribution, still many countries in this region, including Bangladesh, have achieved self-sufficiency in food with some export. It is to be noted, however, that 15%–30% of the product is lost every year due to lack of scientific postharvest management systems, i.e., proper utilization of agro-product processing technology (Bala, 2017). To overcome this problem and for overall development, we need to develop postharvest technologies to promote processing and value addition for reduction in losses and better utilization of produces and by-products. The role of postharvest technology in increasing productivity, income, and employment can be illustrated as shown in Figure 1.1. Farm income can be maximized by increasing farm production as well as loss reduction, value addition, and employment. Farm productivity can be increased by adequate inputs supported by assets and appropriate technology transfer. Loss reduction, value addition, and employment generation can be implemented through proper utilization of postharvest technology, which largely depends on capital investment, technology transfer, and research and development. Thus, postharvest technology transfer plays a major role in enhancing the farm income and hence increases the farm assets—i.e., it contributes to economic growth. Proper use of farm inputs and adoption of proper postharvest technology contribute to increased farm production and postharvest loss reduction, respectively, and the process is regenerative as indicated in Figure 1.1. This emphasizes importance of postharvest technology to reduce the losses of farm production to make more food available rather than the statistics of more farm production.

FIGURE 1.1 Postharvest technology in increasing farm productivity, income, and employment.

1.2 IMPOTENCE OF POSTHARVEST TECHNOLOGY

Postharvest technology has the capability to reduce losses, provide value addition, and generate employment. Agricultural development has two major activities: production and postharvest processing, as indicated in Figure 1.1. Postharvest processing refers to the processing and treatments that are carried out after harvesting, and it starts at harvesting and ends at marketing. All the processes such as harvesting, threshing, drying, storage, parboiling, milling, and preserving in cold storage...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Author
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Physical, Thermal, and Chemical Properties of Food and Biological Materials
• Chapter 3 Cleaning, Grading, and Sorting
• Chapter 4 Psychrometry
• Chapter 5 Drying of Agro Products
• Chapter 6 Parboiling of Rice
• Chapter 7 Milling of Rice and Wheat
• Chapter 8 By-Product Utilization
• Chapter 9 Storage of Agro Products
• Chapter 10 Heating and Cooling of Agro Products
• Chapter 11 Refrigeration and Cold Storage
• Chapter 12 Separation
• Chapter 13 Materials Handling and Conveying
• Chapter 14 Process Dynamics and Control
• Chapter 15 Emerging Technologies
• Index