Organic Rice Production Practices: Effects on Grain End-Use Quality, Healthfulness, and Safety

Fruit quality in organic and conventional farming: advantages and limitations

Fruit quality is essential for nutrition and human health and needs urgent attention in current agricultural practices. Organic farming is not as productive as conventional agriculture, but it can provide higher quality in some fruit crops, thanks to the absence of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, enhanced pollination, and the reduction of protection treatments, hence boosting antioxidant compound production. Although organic farming does not always provide healthier food than conventional farming, some lessons from organic farming can be extrapolated to new sustainable production models. Exploiting natural resources and an adequate knowledge transfer will undoubtedly help improve the quality of climacteric and nonclimacteric fruits in new agricultural systems.

Impacts of Inherent Components and Nitrogen Fertilizer on Eating and Cooking Quality of Rice: A Review

With the continuous improvement of living standards, the preferences of consumers are shifting to rice varieties with high eating and cooking quality (ECQ). Milled rice is mainly composed of starch, protein, and oil, which constitute the physicochemical basis of rice taste quality. This review summarizes the relationship between rice ECQ and its intrinsic ingredients, and also briefly introduces the effects of nitrogen fertilizer management on rice ECQ. Rice varieties with higher AC usually have more long branches of amylopectin, which leach less when cooking, leading to higher hardness, lower stickinesss, and less panelist preference. High PC impedes starch pasting, and it may be hard for heat and moisture to enter the rice interior, ultimately resulting in worse rice eating quality. Rice with higher lipid content had a brighter luster and better eating quality, and starch lipids in rice have a greater impact on rice eating quality than non-starch lipids. The application of nitrogen fertilizer can enhance rice yield, but it also decreases the ECQ of rice. CRNF has been widely used in cereal crops such as maize, wheat, and rice as a novel, environmentally friendly, and effective fertilizer, and could increase rice quality to a certain extent compared with conventional urea. This review shows a benefit to finding more reasonable nitrogen fertilizer management that can be used to regulate the physical and chemical indicators of rice grains in production and to improve the taste quality of rice without affecting yield.