This informative new book takes an interdisciplinary look at agricultural and food production and how new engineering practices can be used to enhance production. With contributions from international experts from India, Russia, China, Serbia, and USA, this book presents a selection of chapters on some of these emerging practices, focusing on soil and water conservation and management; agricultural processing engineering; water quality and management; emerging agricultural crops; renewable energy use in agriculture; and applications of nanotechnology in agriculture.

"Food Process Engineering focuses on the design, operation and maintenance of chemical and other process manufacturing activities. The development of "Agro Processing" will spur agricultural diversification. There are several benefits of promoting small scale agro-processing units rather large scale for the promotion of rural entrepreneurship. Appropriate post harvest management and value addition to agricultural products, in their production catchments, will lead to employment and income generation in the rural sector and minimize the losses of harvested biomass. Adoption of suitable technology plays a vital role in fixing the cost of the final product and consequently makes the venture, a profitable one. It is observed that imported agro-processing machines or their imitations are used for preparing food products. Actually, the working of these machines should be critically studied in context of the energy input and the quality of the finished product."

This book resulted from many years of teaching engineering aspects of food tech nology at the Agricultural University ofWageningen, The Netherlands. In the course of those years the subject matter of teaching has been written down and placed at the student's disposal. The Dutch text has been reconsidered and revised several times. Eventually the question arose whether it would be advisable to transform and translate the text in order to transfer available knowledge and experience to others interested in the relatively new branch of food science that food process engineering is. This question has been answered in the affirmative. Up to now only a few books deal with food process engineering; some are rather superficial and evidently meant as introductory, other ones have in our opinion too much emphasis on chemical engineering and too little on food process engineering. We believe - and this will be elucidated at some length in the Introduction - that food process engineering is in many respects a very specific branch of engineering, allied to but certainly different from chemical engineering. We have always endeav oured to show similarities between various branches, stressing at the same time how ever the differences and explaining the why and wherefore of them. The present book illustrates this approach. It considers engineering, process en gineering and food process engineering as ranking in this order of rising importance.