Background and objectives: Barley as native cereal is the single source of carbohydrate in fattening sheep. But barley causes some problems due to the fast degradation in the rumen like acidosis and decrease in growth performance. So the replacement of barley with another cereal like CORN is necessary because CORN has slow degradability in the rumen. On the other hand, any change in the ration composition has economical and financial effects in addition to the nutritional effects. Ignoring these financial and economic effects in decision making about the ration composition or changing it, could results in negative consequences. Different ration compositions could simultaneously have different cost and revenue effects and eventually different profitability consequences.Materials and methods: This study has tried to investigate all positive and negative economic consequences of replacement barley with different processed CORN in fattening lambs. For this purpose, the used feeds in fattening period were balanced based on the experimental treatments with fixed quantity of protein and energy and 7 treatments/diets including 1) 100% Barley, 2) 50%: 50% Barley & Grinding CORN, 3) 100% Grinding CORN, 4) 50%: 50% Barley & Steam Flaking CORN, 5) 100% Steam Flaking CORN, 6) 50%: 50% Barley & Pelleting CORN and 7) 100% Pelleting CORN. Every treatment included five lambs and each of 35 lambs was individually experimented during 84 days.Results: The results indicated that the rations control treatment and 100% steam flaking CORN respectively have the least and the most cost increase for all periods.Also, the rations control treatment and 100% pelleting CORN respectively have the least and the most revenue increase for all periods.Conclusion: Totally, and based on the partial budgeting results the rations 100% steam flaking CORN and 100% pelleting CORN respectively have the least and the most effects on relative profitability for all periods.

Introduction: The use of radiation has become a way of life in most countries around the globe. The utilization of nuclear techniques in the area of agriculture, defense, and power generation has increased over the last few decades. Radiation technology is widely used to produce changes in product characteristics leading to the development of new products. Radiation-mediated morphological, structural and/or functional changes in a plant are governed by the intensity and duration of the gamma irradiation. Gamma irradiation was found to increase plant productivity. Gamma rays represent one of the important physical agents used to improve the characters and productivity of many plants (e.g. rice, maize, bean, cowpea, and potato). Gamma irradiation also has been found to be very useful for both sterilization and for the preservation of food and cereal grain in nutrition and agriculture. Gamma rays were also found to cause modulation in protein patterns by inducing the appearance and/or disappearance of some protein bands. It has been shown that large DNA strands were broken into small strands at low irradiation doses but small and large DNA strands were broken at higher irradiation doses. Also it has reported that germination of SEEDS can be influenced in both positive and negative directions by gamma radiation exposure as a result of mutation inductions depending on cellular abnormalities or stimulatory modifications triggered by radiation doses. In several studies, lethal and stimulatory effects of gamma irradiation on germination percentage, emergence, and survival of seedlings of different plant species have been reported. The present work has been intended to investigate the response of CORN SEEDS exposed to gamma irradiation (25 Gys) in terms of the nutritional performance of its forage and silage compared with control non-exposed SEEDS.Materials and Methods: CORN SEEDS were obtained from the Vegetable Crop Seed Production and Technology section, Ghezlagh Farm, College of Abouraihan, university of Tehran, Iran. Four kg CORN SEEDS (single cross 704) were divided into 2 groups. The first group did not have any treatment to serve as a control, while the second group was irradiated with Gamma rays (25 Gray) using Gamma cell – cobalt- 60 instruction and with the rate of 0.55 Gr/ min at the Nuclear Agricultural Research School, Nuclear Science and Technology Research Institute, Karaj, Iran. Field experiments were conducted during the summer seasons at Ghezlal farm Research Station located at the southwest of Tehran province, Varamin, to study the effect of gamma irradiation (25 Gray) on the performance of CORN forage and silage. After irradiation, control and irradiated SEEDS were cultivated in 2000 m2. Agricultural practices such as: irrigation, weeding, fertilization, and pest control were carried out as recommended. Samples of CORN plants were obtained at the late stage of growth and amounts of proline, soluble carbohydrate, and protein were determined. Performance chrematistics of experimental groups were also recorded. After harvesting, the CORN forage was chopped and transferred to an experimental silo made of polyethylene pipe. DM, ash, CP, NDF, and ADF of experimental silages were determined according to standards procedures. The pH of silage also was determined using pH meters. For the determination of gas production parameters, 200 mg of dry samples were incubated at gas production environment and the amount and rate of gas production were recorded at a different time of incubation (0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 12, 24, 48, 72 and 96 h). Using gas production parameters, the amount of OM digestibility, ME, NEL, and SCFA were also determined. Data were analyzed using the t-student test of SAS software (ver. 9.1). Duncan’s multiple range test was used to detect statistical significance between treatments using a significance level of 0.05.Results and discussion: Irradiation of CORN SEEDS increased CORN performance (wet and dry weight of seed and forage), amount of soluble carbohydrates and protein, and concentration of proline (P<0.05). The exposed treatment showed the highest increase in seed weight, seed number, and weight of 1000 SEEDS as compared to the control (P < 0.05). Amount of gas, and b and c fractions of gas production, the concentration of short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs), metabolizable (ME) and net energy for lactation (NEL), and organic matter digestibility (OMD) were higher for treated CORN forage and silage compared to the control group (P < 0.05). Also, exposed CORN silage had a lower level of pH and higher amount of dry matter (DM) and crude protein (CP) than control (P < 0.05).Conclusion: The results of this study show that exposing irradiation of CORN SEEDS to 25 gray gamma-ray improves fermentation parameters and nutrition values of CORN forage and silage.

This research carried out in order to CORN kernels drying by using a discontinuous rotary drum dryer. This research evaluated the effect of drying air temperature and velocity of the rotating cylinder parameters on the drying time, breakage percentage, cracking, burn kernels and the disruptive energy of CORN kernels. For this purpose, a batch dryer rotating cylindrical drum rotation is designed and developed. Intake air temperature parameter Was considered at four levels of 40, 60, 80 and 100 oC and the drum rotation speed at three levels of 2, 6 and 10 rpm. The results indicated significant interaction effect of temperature and speed rotation cylinder on maize grain drying. The lowest time kernels CORN drying and the cylinder rotation speed was at 100 oC and 2 rpm, respectively. With increasing temperature of dryer from 40 to 100 oC, grain drying time is reduced to less than a quarter but; with increasing rotation speed of the cylinder drying time was increases. During the drying process, the interaction of temperature and rotation speed of the cylinder has no significant effect on broken kernels-CORN. The maximum percentage of broken grains of CORN is in 10 rpm rotation speed. Interaction of temperature and rotation speed of the cylinder is significant at the one percent level on cracked and burned grains. The More of the cracks and burn is in 100 oC temperature and 2 rpm of rotation speed.

Drying SEEDS, will increase storage time. Drying SEEDS of crops, the process is very critical because it damages embryos in the process of drying the SEEDS, their germination is lost. The results showed that damage to the embryo inside the seed, immediately after drying operation itself does not appear. In this research factors affecting drying CORN SEEDS (the Single Cross 704) to maintain viability, in a fluidized bed dryer were studied. For experiment was dried with three drying air temperature (33, 37 and 43oC), three drying air velocity (0.5, 1 and 1.5m/s) and 20% humidity at two different times (immediately after the drying process and after 6 months). After drying the SEEDS (reaching 13% moisture) and after 6 months of storage, germination tests were performed. The results showed that all of the tests, the effect of drying temperature on germination rate is significant at 1%, but the impact of air velocity dryer, even not significant at the 5% level. The highest percentage of germination is at 33oC and 0.5m/s drying air velocity.

Mechanical damage in grains and SEEDS during harvesting, trashing and transporting stages affects germination seed vigor seriously as well as ultimately affects the quality of the product. The general objective of this study was to investigate the effect of parameters of pneumatic transfer (transfer velocity, path length and mass flow rate) on quality properties of CORN SEEDS (germination percentage, seed vigor, germination speed, mass loss and electrical conductivity). At the first time, a dilute phase pneumatic conveyor was constructed. Then, CORN transfer an experiment was performing at different levels of pipe length (1, 2 and 3 m), inlet air velocity (13, 17 and 20 m/s) and mass flow rate (200, 250 and 300 kg/h). The experimental design was factorial based on completely randomized design. The results of the experiments showed that with increasing pipe length and mass flow rate, the percentage of germination decreased significantly (p≤ 0. 01). The interaction of length, velocity and mass flow rate on seed vigor was significant (p≤ 0. 01). The highest seed vigor index was obtained at a 1m length of pipe, 13 m / s velosity and mass flow rate of 300 kg / h; and the lowest seed vigor index at 3 m of length, 13 m / s vlocity and mass flow rate of 300 kg / h. The effect of pipe length on seed electrical conductivity was significant (p≤ 0. 05), and other parametrs had no significant effect on the electrical conductivity of seed.

The highest yield of CORN seed is obtained at the best uniformity of their placement distances and density in the field. So, in this study by changing the components of the parameters witch effect on grooved roller metering device designing, it could be able to present a new design of metering device in Solidworks software and built from PTFE material for row-crop CORN planting. The laboratory evaluation was done on grease belt in eight level of distance between SEEDS (8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15 cm) which were resulted from number of grooves (three levels) and metering device rotational speeds (eight levels) in 3/5 Km. h-1 forward speed. The multiple index, quality of feed index, miss index, precision index and damaged SEEDS were considered to evaluate the performance of grooved roller metering device. By using completely randomized design with three replications in SAS and SPSS software, the results were analyzed. With multiple linear regression, the optimum amount of distance between SEEDS (11cm) that arose in 105rpm rotational speed of metering devices with 5 grooves.

In this investigation, to design the process of oil extraction from CORN germ on an industrial scale, three cooking temperatures (80, 85 and 90 °, C) and three different moisture contents of the output SEEDS from the cooking pot (3, 3. 5 and 4%) were considered and the quantity of insoluble fine partial and oil acidity, oil, protein and moisture contents of the obtained meals were studied as responses. To predict the changes' trend the artificial neural network in MATLAB R2013a software was used. By studying the various networks of back propagation feed forward network with wide range of various topologies, the arrangement of 2-6-5 with a correlation coefficient (R2= 0. 984) and the mean squared error (MSE=0. 003) with using sigmoid hyperbolic of tangent activation function was selected as optimized design. Also Levenberg-Marquardt learning algorithm and learning cycle of 1000 were specified as the best neural model. The results of optimized selected models were evaluated and these models with high correlation coefficients (>0. 953) were able to predict the variations process. On the other hand, the results showed that the models obtained in this study had the highest accuracy in predicting the moisture content of the meal. Finally, it was Experimentally determined that for the best properties of CORN germ oil and meal, the cooker temperature and moisture contents of the output SEEDS from the cooking pot should be 80 °,C and 3%, respectively.

Three hundred and seventy three isolates of fusarium moniliforme were recovered from two CORN SEEDS from two cultivars both grown at 12 locations in the North Central United States. For these isolates, 2888 nit mutants (1298 nit mutants were from isolates of cultivar 3377, and the rest from isolates of cultivar 3475) were generated using minimal medium containing potassium chlorate. Nit muntants were divided into three phenotypic classes (nitl, nit3, and NitM) based on their growth on the medium containing different nitrogen sources. Of the nit mutants obtained from isolates of cultivar 3377, 25%, 45% and 30%, and of the nit mutants obtained from isolates of cultivar 3475, 18%, 53% and 29% were NitM, nit1 and nit3, respectively. Nit mutants were used to force heterokaryon to determine distribution of vegetative compatibility groups (VCGs) within and between seed lots for CORN cultivars 3377 and 3475. Of the 194 VCGs identified, 134 were represented each by a single isolate. These kinds of VCGs comprised 33-87% and 33-88% of the VCGs found in seed lots for cultivars 3377 and 3475, respectively. Of the 91 and 103 VCGs identified for the cultivars 3377 and 3475, respectively 10 and seven VCGs were found at more than one site. At five locations, isolates in a common VCG were recovered from both cultivars. At one location 69% of its isolates belonged to a single VCG, which was the largest VCG identified in this study, but no members of this group were found at any other location. Isolates belonging to this group comprised only 5% within the population as a whole. These data suggest that the population of F. moniliforme are highly localized, and are genetically diverse, and that seed CORN movement could provide a mechanism to explain the variability observed in commercial fields.

Nutritional indices of Helicoverpa armigera (Hubner) larvae, an economic insect pest of agricultural crops in the world, were studied on five CORN hybrids (SC700, SC704, SC500, DC370 and SC260) when incorporated into artificial diets under laboratory conditions at 25±1 oC, relative humidity of 65±5% and a photoperiod of 16:8 (L: D) h. The highest values of consumption index (CI) and relative growth rate (RGR) of the fourth instars were on SC500 (37.21±3.34 and 0.43±0.07 mg/mg/day, respectively) and lowest values of these indices were on SC704 (21.44±2.83 and 0.18±0.04, respectively). Among five CORN hybrids tested, efficiency of conversion of ingested food (ECI) of fifth instars was the highest on SC260 (6.92±0.5%) and the highest value of efficiency of conversion of digested food (ECD) was on SC704 (10.71±3%). However, the larvae fed on SC700 had the lowest values of ECI and ECD (3.57±0.3 and 4.39±0.4%, respectively). For the sixth instar larvae, although the lowest CI and approximate digestibility (AD) values were observed on SC260 (3.49±0.17 and 53.89±3.70%, respectively) the highest value of ECI and ECD was on SC260 (9.11±0.6 and 16.54±1.5%, respectively). For the whole instars larvae (fourth to sixth instars), ECD value of H. armigera was the highest on SC260 (10.15±1.08%) and lowest on SC700 (6.32±0.47%). The results of this study pointed out higher nutritional performance of the larvae H. armigera reared on SC704 and SC260 and lower on SC700 and SC500.