eChapters

12.1 Introduction

Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) are chemicals that evaporate easily at room temperature. The term “organic” indicates that the compounds contain carbon. VOC exposures are often associated with an odor while other times there is no odor. Both can be harmful. There are thousands of different VOCs produced and used in our daily lives.

Freshwater prawns, particularly Macrobrachium rosenbergii (giant river prawn), are among the most valuable aquaculture species in tropical and subtropical regions, including India. The seed rearing phase—spanning the period between larval rearing in hatcheries and grow-out farming—is critical to the success of prawn cultivation. After metamorphosis from larva to post-larva (PL1 to PL20), juveniles are transferred to nursery systems for 20–30 days. This phase enhances survival rates, promotes uniform growth, and boosts immunity. Seed rearing is carried out in concrete tanks, earthen ponds, FRP tanks, or indoor net enclosures (hapas). Maintaining optimal water quality is essential, with ideal conditions being:
• Temperature: 28–31°C
• pH: 7.0–8.5
• Dissolved oxygen: >4 mg/L
Given their benthic and territorial nature, prawns require adequate space and shelters (bamboo sticks, mesh, plastic pipes) to minimize cannibalism and stress. Feeding starts with live feeds like Artemia and zooplankton, followed by a gradual shift to formulated starter feed containing 35–40% protein. Feed is distributed 3–4 times daily based on biomass and consumption. Regular removal of uneaten feed and waste is vital to maintain water quality. Health management includes periodic sampling, growth monitoring, and the use of probiotics or immunostimulants to enhance gut health and disease resistance.

Valorization refers to the process of enhancing the value or price of something, often through government intervention or by recognizing its inherent worth. It can involve stabilizing prices, creating value from overlooked materials, or promoting the importance of a particular concept. In the context of waste management, valorization specifically denotes the conversion of waste materials into useful, marketable products using innovative and sustainable methods. It plays a critical role in waste-to-value processes by shifting the focus from traditional waste disposal to resource recovery, aligning with the principles of a circular economy. Rather than viewing waste solely as an environmental challenge, valorization recognizes it as a valuable resource. When processed properly, waste can yield energy, materials, or bio-based products. Common techniques include composting, anaerobic digestion, pyrolysis, and recycling, which are used to extract value from agricultural, industrial, and municipal waste. The primary goals of valorization are to reduce environmental pollution, generate economic returns, promote sustainability, and lessen reliance on virgin raw materials. By driving innovation in biotechnology, materials science, and engineering, valorization supports the growth of eco-friendly industries and fosters long-term environmental responsibility. Ultimately, it transforms waste management into a proactive, profitable, and sustainable practice.
Meaning and Definition
Valorization refers to the process of enhancing or increasing the value of a material, product, or resource—particularly one that is considered waste or of low economic worth—by converting it into a more useful, marketable, or environmentally beneficial form.
Definition
Valorization is the act or process of transforming waste materials, by-products, or low-value resources into valuable products, energy, or materials through physical, chemical, or biological methods. Its goals are to reduce environmental impact while simultaneously generating economic and social benefits. As such, valorization is a fundamental principle of the circular economy and sustainable development.

Introduction

Enough literature is available to understand the concept of extension. But are there any efforts to understand the in-tensions of ex-tension? Why should we emphasize on inner tensions of extension? to be a successful extension professional for bringing about the desirable changes in the behaviour of stakeholders, we need to understand the inner-tensions of extension in addition to the concept of extension.

Since inception of extension services, the model adopted for transfer of technology was dominated Technology, wherein the core emphasis was on the transfer of technology. The end product was the partial adoption of the technology or non-adoption of the technology. Learning from the experiences, modifications were made in the model and came out with extension mediated technology transfer system, wherein the technology is inseparable component of extension, which was combined with the human element or the societal element. The approaches adopted by different models of extension service delivery were also diverse.

The first model of extension service delivery the Public extension system or the Ministry of Agriculture, which delivers the extension services in the form of a systems approach. The relationship with the farmers or the end users is ‘take it or leave it’. Whether the receivers are gaining it or not, whether they do understand it or not, ultimately we are transferring it, and are ending it with the target oriented approach.

A water budget quantitatively accounts for water entering, leaving and remaining within a defined agricultural or hydrological system. Comparable to a financial budget, it considers precipitation, irrigation, runoff, evapotranspiration, percolation and changes in storage. This chapter explains the climatic and soil-water budget, potential and actual evapotranspiration, water surplus, water deficit and moisture adequacy. It discusses how water-balance analysis supports irrigation scheduling, crop planning, drought assessment, rainwater harvesting and watershed management. Understanding the timing and magnitude of water availability helps farmers and planners select crops and management practices suited to local conditions. Water budgeting therefore provides a fundamental tool for climate-resilient and resource-efficient agriculture.

Pesticides are used to control plant growth (herbicides), insects (insecticides), worms  (vermicides), bacteria (bacteriocides), fungi (fungicides), and other organisms. Almost without exception, pesticides are used to benefit humans by the control of unwanted species of plants (e.g. weeds in a lawn), disease-causing bacteria (e.g., Pneumococcus, the causative agent of pneumonia), disease-carrying insects (e.g. malarial or yellow fever mosquitoes) or in controlling destruction of agricultural products by disease-causing organisms (e.g., corn-borers, the virus of anthurium blight). Although they are by and large mostly beneficial, pesticides used both properly and improperly are also “resources out of place”, that is pollutants, that are subject to normal ecological processes.

R₁, R₂, R₃: The symbols used to designate first, second and third irradiation generation.

Race: i) A genetic subdivision of a species, with more or less distinct characteristics when grown in a particular environment. Sometimes used to denote a portion of a cline. Differences among races may or may not be adaptive; differences among ecotypes are presumed to be adaptive. Hence, ‘race’ is a more general term than ecotype. ii) A genetically and often geographically distinct mating group within a species; also a group of pathogens that infect a given set of plant varieties.

HUMAN POPULATION GROWTH

The evolution of man took place about one million years ago in response to changes in the physical environment. We learnt gradually to adapt different modes of life to varying environments and migrated different parts of the world. Human activities have had their impact on the environment, which was depending on the number of people living in  the area and  their level  of economic development. Per capita consumption of food, energy and other resources in developed countries is larger and its impact on the environment is much greater than equal number of persons living in developing countries in Africa or Asia. Therefore, the distribution of population needs to be examined in detail.

Definition: Shrub is a woody plant with several stems/branches arising at or near the ground level from the main stem, which is perennial in nature and smaller than a tree.

Shrubs are the integral part of a garden and have immense importance in landscaping as these are used for various purposes. Shrubs produce flowers, foliage, fruits, berries and enhance beauty of garden tremendously. They are hardy in nature and require less care than other ornamental plants. Availability of a large number of species and cultivars, a wide range of variations in shape, size and growth habits, remarkable range of sizes, shape and colour of flowers and fragrance have made the shrub an important garden plant.

While setting up a garden or landscaping an area, the natural floristic wealth is ignored very often. But many of those flora are much adapted to prevailing soil and climatic conditions of the area. Plants with attractive flowers or foliage could be retained to maintain the natural appearance as well as to reduce cost of landscaping.Very familiar plants of our surroundings having good ornamental value are discussed in this chapter.

Goanese Ipecacuanha 
Naregamia alata commonly known as Goanese Ipecacuanha is a member of family Meliaceae. It is known as Tinparni in Hindi, Triparnika in Sanskrit, Nilanarakam in Malayalam, Nilanreagam in Tamil and Nelanaringa in Kannada. Common name was derived from its use of roots in treatment of malaria. Vernacular name, Nilanarakam originated from its morphological resemblance to members of Rutaceae. 

The Global Environmental Issues

 
Expansion of the scale of human activity in recent years has put so much strain on the natural environment of this planet that in some cases nature can no longer recover. The nature’s ability though recovers damage or harmful effects in one part of the world do not stop in the very area and keeps going beyond national borders and become environmental problems on a global scale, but in a limited manner.

Storage plays a crucial role between harvesting and the processing or direct consumption of food grains. In developing countries, its significance is amplified, especially since small and medium landholding farmers heavily rely on on-farm storage. In India, however, an annual storage loss of 14 million tons, worth approximately 7,000 crores, occurs due to post-harvest pest damage. The economic loss from storage pests is not only a result of consumption but also due to contamination and spoilage caused by the pests’ body parts, excreta, and hoarding. The lack of awareness about storage pests, their damage, and the use of improper storage techniques contribute to these massive losses.
The solution lies in constructing suitable storage structures, which are wellequipped and properly managed, and implementing strict hygiene standards in storage areas, along with efficient pest control measures. These combined efforts are essential to minimize storage losses. This section focuses on identifying major pests in storage and their management strategies.
SIGNIFICANT INSECT PESTS OF GRAINS THAT ARE STORED
The primary insect pests that affect stored grains include:
• Lesser grain borer (Rhizopertha dominica)
• Rice weevil (Sitophilus oryzae)
• Khapra beetle (Trogoderma granarium)
• Rust red flour beetle (Tribolium castaneum)
• Long headed flour beetle (Latheticus oryzae)
• Saw toothed beetle (Oryzaephilus surinamensis)
• Rice moth (Corcyra cephalonica)
• Almond moth (Cadra cautella)
• Angoumois grain moth (Sitotroga cerealella)

Plant pathogens are known to cause yield reduction of almost 20 per cent in the principal food and cash crops worldwide (Oorke et al., 1994). These losses may be more severe when highly susceptible cultivars are widely grown in a particular region of the globe. The increased world’s population is posing a major global challenge to provide sufficient quatity of food with high quality fruits and vegetables. Nearly, 570 million US $ is now spent annually on research and development by the leading 15 agricultural Companies to combat with the important diseases of major food, fruits and vegetable crops. There are more than 150 active ingredients registered as fungicides worldwide (Mc Dougal, 1996). In the present era of intensive agriculture, fungicides play an important role in our fight against plant diseases and reduce the losses in yield and quality of farm produce. The global fungicide sale has been estimated to be $ 6.0 billion US. The cereal and vine industries of the Western European have become largest fungicide market followed by North America. However, the fungicide use is not intensive in Asia and the new world.

This article presents the historical development of fungicides, mode of their action, development of resistance to fungicides, fungicidal residue and chemical control of various diseases of horticultural and plantation crops.

India is the world’s second largest producer of fruits, of which mango, banana, citrus, guava, grape, pineapple and apple are the major ones. Apart from these, fruits like papaya, sapota, aonla, phalsa, jackfruit, ber, pomegranate in tropical and sub-tropical parts and peach, pear, almond, walnut, apricot and strawberry in the temperate parts are also grown in a sizeable area. Date palm and fig cultivation is also finding favour in some areas. The major fruit growing states are Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat.

Production of fruits in India is 44.04 million tones from an area of 3.72 million hectares. One of the bottlenecks in fruit production is the losses incurred by insect pest and diseases which necessitated the use of pesticides to curb the pest problem. Use of pesticides in India is very low 0.350–0.5 kg/hectare as compared to 7.0 kg/hectare in USA, 2.5 kg/hectare in Europe, 12 kg/hectare in Japan and 6.6 kg/hectare in Korea. Despite of low pesticide consumption in India, there is a great problem of pesticide residues vis-a-vis other countries and these residues have entered into food products and underground water because of non-prescribed use of chemical pesticides, wrong advice and supply of pesticides to farmers by vested interests, non-observance of prescribed waiting period, pre-marketing pesticide treatments during storage and transport, use of sub-standard pesticides, effluents from pesticide manufacturing units, continued use of persistent pesticides for public health programme, lack of awareness and lack of aggressive educational programmes for farmers/consumers.

Need of Analysis Technique

There are various methods to determine the concentration of a substance present in the matrix of an organic matter, these methods are very expensive, require expertise, need skilled man power, expensive chemicals and sophisticated equipments. But the volumetric analysis requires very less equipment and its level of accuracy is fairly high. It is very beneficial in the preparation of normal and molar solutions which is the back bone of all the research. Scientific venture is useless without the preparation of accurate standard solutions which is to be used in the estimation of various substances by sophisticated techniques like colorimetry, spectrophotometry, atomic absorption spectrophotometer (AAS), inductively coupled plasma emission spectrophotometer (ICP) etc. So the emphasis has been laid on the preparation of quick and accurate preparation of the standards. Volumetric analysis is the simplest technique by which, we can determine the concentration of a substance in solution form by titration of unknown solution against a known concentration solution. One solution is called the standard (known concentration) and other is called unknown solution. In this, reaction takes place either

Our emotions play quite a significant role in guiding and directing our behavior. Many a times they are seen to dominate our behavior in such a way that we have no solution other than behaving as per their wish. On the other hand, if a person has no emotional current then he becomes crippled in terms of living his life in a normal way. Hence, emotions play a key role in providing a particular direction to our behavior and thus shaping our personality according to their development.

Etymologically, the word emotion is derived from the Latin word ‘emovere’ which means ‘to stir up’ or ‘to excite’. Emotion implies a state of being stirred up or aroused in one way or another. Therefore, emotion may be understood as an agitated or excited state of our mind and body. It involves extensive visual disturbance and includes many feeling tones or varying degrees of satisfaction or annoyance. Feeling may be a simple degree of emotional experience. Psychologists and physiologists are in agreement that emotion involves feelings, impulses and physiological reactions.

Thus, whatever may be the terminology used by different psychologists, their definition tends to describe “emotions as some sort of feelings or affective experiences which are characterized by some physiological changes that generally lead them to perform some or the other type of behavioral act”.

E numbers: Each food additive used in the food industry has been given a specific number code for their identification. These numbers are called as E numbers. These E numbers are used within the European Union. The word prefix “E” stands for Europe. They are commonly used on the food label through out the European Union. These are not used in Australia and New Zealand. The different food additives are given different E numbers depending upon the type of food additive like E100-E199 (food colours), E200-E299 (preservative), E300-E399 (antioxidants), E400-E499 (thickners, stabilizers, emulsifier), E500-E599 (pH regulator, anticaking agent), E600- E699 (flavour enhancers), E700-E799 (antibiotics), E900-E999 (miscellaneous like waxes, synthetic glazes, packaging gases, sweetners, foaming agents) and E1000-E1099 (additional chemicals).

Eovalue: It is the thermodynamic favourability of the reaction.

Genetic Basis of Heterosis

There are three theories to explain the genetic basis of heterosis: (1) dominance hypothesis, (2) over-dominance hypothesis and (3) epistasis.

Dominance Hypothesis

Davenport (1908) first proposed this hypothesis and he considered that heterosis is a consequence of action and interaction of favourable dominant genes brought together in a hybrid. Bruce, Keeble and Pellew explained it in 1910. This hypothesis suggests that at each locus the dominant allele have favourable effect, while recessive allele has unfavourable effect. In heterozygous state, deleterious effects of recessive alleles are masked by their dominant alleles. Thus, heterosis results from masking of harmful effects of recessive alleles by their dominant alleles. The harmful effects of recessive alleles, which becomes homozygous due to inbreeding. Therefore, according to dominance hypothesis, heterosis is not the result of heterozygosity; it is the result of prevention of expression of harmful recessive allele by their dominant alleles (Fig.1). In this hypothesis, there are two objections (i) the first objection relates to the failure in isolation of homozygous lines for all the dominant genes, and (ii) the second objection is directed at the symmetrical distribution in F₂. Both the objections are discussed below:

17.1 Introduction
Butter is a fat concentrate that is produced by churning cream to create a solid bulk, which is subsequently processed. The table creamery butter is produced from the cream or coagulate of cows or buffaloes, or a combination of the two. It may contain common salt and natural colorants such as annatto or carotene, but it should be devoid of other animal lipids, wax, mineral oils, and vegetable oils and fats. The only permitted additives are common salt and natural colorants (annatto and carotene), with no preservatives permitted.. The butter must contain a minimum of 80% milk fat, no more than 1.5% curd, and no more than 3% sodium measured by weight. Diacetyl may be incorporated for flavoring purposes; however, it is prohibited from exceeding 4 ppm. Calcium hydroxide, sodium carbonate, and sodium polyphosphate are permissible additives, provided that their combined weight does not exceed 0.2% of the butter’s weight.
17.2 Classification
The market supplies a wide variety of butter varieties. This varies depending on the kind of cream used in their production as well as other factors. The varieties of butter are:
1. Pasteurized cream butter: Usually made from sweet cream that has been pasteurised. However, this kind of butter has a milder flavour than the same kind of cream that hasn’t been pasteurised.
2. Ripened cream butter: Butter is produced through adding butter culture to cream and incubating it until the desired acidity and flavour are achieved. Authentically made ripened cream butter possesses a mild
flavour commonly known as ‘real butter flavour’.
3. Unripened cream butter: Created from fresh, unripened cream.
4. Salted butter: Butter with added salt.
5. Unsalted butter: Butter without any added salt.
6. Sweet cream butter: Butter made from cream with an acidity level not exceeding 0.2%.

Normal Solution in Analytical Chemistry

A normal solution is that one that contains one equivalent weight expressed  in grams (one gram equivalent weight) to be dissolved substance per litre of solution, or one gram-milliequivalent weight per millilitre.

In the case of acid a 1N solution contains 1.008 gram of replaceable hydrogen per litre of solution. A 1N solution of a base is one that contains 17.008 of hydroxyl per litre. A 1N solution of a precipitating agent contains a weight of precipitating ion equivalent to 1.008 hydrogen. The quantity of pure reagent necessary per litre of 1N solution of a precipitating solution is calculated by dividing the gram molecular weight by the valency of the precipitating ion. In case of normal solution of oxidising and reducing agents, the amount is calculated by dividing the gram molecular weight by the total valency change in the ion concerned.