With the development of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, convolutional neural networks (CNN) have become one of the key tools in the field of computer vision. They are actively used to solve problems related to the identification and classification of objects. In agriculture, where the accuracy and speed of data processing are of critical importance, CNNs have found wide application, in particular, for the automatic recognition of weeds in crops. The purpose of this study is to develop image classifiers based on ResNet-18, ResNet-34 and ResNet-50 convolutional models  to identify weeds and classify their prevalence in grain crop areas. The results of phytosanitary monitoring of wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) and barley (Hordeum sativum L.) crops and photographs of accounting sites are used as initial information. During the monitoring, 19 weed species were identified that were present in the areas with varying degrees of intensity. To quantify the weediness, each species was assigned an identifier: 0 – if the species exceeded the economic threshold of harmfulness (ETH), 1 - if it did not exceed it. The main task of the classifier was to recognize weeds in photographs and determine one of two gradations of weediness of the area. The proposed approach demonstrated high efficiency. The accuracy of classifications on the test set of images was 95% on average. An error matrix was constructed to assess the reliability of the method, which also confirmed the high accuracy of predictions. The obtained results indicate the high efficiency of using ResNet architectures for automatic weed recognition tasks. Practical application of the developed classifiers allows for prompt phytosanitary diagnostics of crops, which contributes to the timely and accurate selection of herbicides for weed control. 

The article presents the results of developing a method for early diagnostics of wheat variety resistance to the combined effects of chloride salinity and infection with the causative agent of common root rot of cereals Bipolaris sorokiniana Shoem. (B. sorokiniana) based on the release of electrolytes  from the leaf tissue of seedlings. The studies were carried out in 2022 and 2023 on four varieties of soft spring wheat. The seedlings were grown from three-day-old germinated seeds infected with the pathogen in a sodium chloride solution (experiment) and in tap water (control) under given climatic conditions. The response of the varieties to stress was determined by the relative change in the specific electrical conductivity (SEC) of aqueous leaf extracts using an edge EC conductometric setup, HANNA Instruments (Germany). The conditions for preparing the samples that ensure maximum intervarietal differences were determined experimentally: the size of the leaf tissue cut is 1.5 mm, the ratio of leaf tissue to water is 1:40, the exposure time of the samples in distilled water is at least 1.5 hours. The conducted assessment of the resistance of wheat varieties showed a greater differentiating ability of the developed method and the greatest intervarietal differences compared to the morphophysiological method. The sample means for relative changes in the SEC of the aqueous extracts of leaf tissue of the varieties differed by 2.6–7.3 times, and the length and biomass of the shoots and roots in these varieties differed by 1.2–2.3 times. The Spearman rank correlation coefficient between the resistance indicators of varieties was r s = 0.88 at p ≤ 0.01. The results of diagnostics of the resistance of the studied wheat varieties according to growth processes and the SEC of aqueous leaf extracts coincided. Variety specificity was revealed: the Novosibirskaya 18 variety is less resistant, Omskaya 18, Sibirskaya 21 and Novosibirskaya 44 are more resistant to the studied combined stress. A conclusion was made about the possibility of using the developed method for the release of leaf electrolytes for early diagnostics (phenotyping) of wheat varieties for resistance to the combined action of B. sorokiniana and chloride salinity. 

The production of potato planting material based on improved source material is widely used in potato growing. Further improvement of mini tuber growing techniques will increase crop yields in the commercial sector. Elements of potato varietal technology have been developed at the stage of mini tubers production in protected soil conditions. An experiment was conducted in a summer greenhouse within the city of Krasnoyarsk to assess the responsiveness of potato varieties common in Russia to the elements of agricultural technology when growing mini tubers. The objects of the study were the very early variety Meteor, early (early ripening) Felox, Rosara, Gulliver, Red Scarlett, Vega. Varietal specificity of potato varieties' responsiveness to indoor cultivation techniques has been established: pot volume, transshipment. The use of two-liter containers ensures maximum revenue and output of mini tubers for the varieties Rosara, Red Scarlett, Felox, and liter containers – Meteor, Gulliver. Minimum efficiency was achieved using five-liter pots. The influence of the “pot size” factor was maximum, amounting to 47.2% for the number of tubers and 63% for the weight of the tuber. The genotype accounted for 15 and 17% of the variability of traits, respectively. The Rosara variety responded positively to being transferred from a 0.2 l seedling container to a 2 l pot. The highest productivity of the Vega variety was obtained when planted in 1 l pots with subsequent decapitation. The average number of tubers in a pot was 6.2 pcs., tuber weight was 8 g. The obtained data can be used in the original seed production of the studied varieties. Taking into account the degree of influence of the genotype on other samples, it will be necessary to clarify the results. 

It is known that the viability of pollen depends not only on weather conditions and agricultural technology, but also on the genotype of the plant. The study examined the relationship between the viability of pollen collected at different times and the variety of remontant raspberry. The results of phenological observations of raspberry varieties and forms during the period from the beginning of vegetation to flowering are presented, and the duration of this period in the conditions of the Southern Baikal region is also considered. The need to accumulate sums of active temperatures for the passage of phenological phases in the conditions of the region under study was taken into account. As a result, three groups of varieties were identified: early, mid-season and late flowering. The viability of pollen of different varieties and forms was determined, and genotypes characterized by consistently good pollen viability (more than 50%) were identified. The period in which the viability of pollen of almost all genotypes was assessed as good was determined. The exceptions were two forms, for which viability was less than 50% during the study period. Statistical analysis showed that air humidity (57%) has the least influence on pollen viability, while air temperature has the greatest influence (more than 90%). It is noted that a decrease in night temperatures to negative critically affects the viability of pollen. Since the viability of pollen in different genotypes was not the same, it is important to select parent plants for pollination based on this feature. Research can help in breeding remontant raspberries. It is possible to increase the efficiency of pollination and increase the yield of hybrid seeds taking this feature into account when selecting parent plants.

Analysis of foreign and domestic works devoted to the study of harmfulness, distribution and bioecological features of the development of Euzophera bigella (Zell.) is given. It has been found that this species occurs under several Latin names (Ephestia bigella, Ephestia stenoptycha, Ephestia egeriella, Euzophera punicaella), presented as synonyms, but the main remains Euzophera bigella. Phytophages are widespread in 23 countries, including the Russian Federation. It has been established that the pest is polyphagous; its caterpillars feed on the fruits and wood of crops such as quince, apple, pear, plum, apricot, cherry, peach, pomegranate, grape, walnut and olive trees. Fruits damaged by phytophages become contaminated with fungal spores, viruses and bacteria, which leads to rotting, drying out, cracking, mummification and falling off of the fruit. When wood is damaged, the bark of the branches and the periderm of trunks swell and crack, which is accompanied by extensive internal necrosis, causing the branches to dry out and the death of entire trees. Depending on the country, region and crop cultivation conditions, E. bigella has two to five generations per year, and fruit damage can reach 20–80%. Caterpillars overwinter in silky cocoons or as third to fifth instar caterpillars and  pupae. Pupation is observed from the end of April or from the middle of May, when the average daily temperature is established and is from 10 to 12 °C. Flight is observed when the sum of effective temperatures (above 10 °C) is from 185.9 to 210 °C (on average 187.5 °C). 

Efficient production of beef from specialized breeds is possible both with industrial technology and with cheaper long-term pasture maintenance. The breeds used in this case differ in genetically determined phenotype, adaptability to different conditions of maintenance. The purpose of the research was to comparatively evaluate the genotypic structure of the intensive type of the Hereford breed and the extensive type of the Kalmyk breed. The study was carried out using SNP and STR markers. The differences were not found in the frequency of genotypes of the LEP, TG5, SCD1, OLR1 genes, with the exception of the TG5 gene, where in the Hereford breed the TG5CC genotype is found by 24.8% higher, the TG5CT genotype by 27.5% lower, compared to the Kalmyk breed. In the polymorphic loci TGLA122 and TGLA53, alleles 151 (locus TGLA122) and alleles 162 and 172 (locus TGLA53) in the Hereford breed were found more often by 13.1%, 19.0% and 15.2%, respectively, compared to the Kalmyk breed. The significant differences were not found in the main selection and genetic parameters (Ca, Naj, V, PIC), calculated on the basis of the allele and genotype frequencies of the LEP, TG5, SCD1, OLR1 genes: heterozygosity is 0.618–0.648; the number of effective alleles is 1.54-1.62; variability is 35.9-39 %; the polymorphism coefficient is 0.352–0.381. Gene equilibrium in the breeds is not disturbed and is within the range of χ2=0.008–4.198. Also, no differences were found between the breeds in population genetic parameters using STR markers. The average number of alleles per locus in the Hereford breed is 10.25, in the Kalmyk breed 8.94, and the number of effective alleles is 4.13–4.73. Homozygosity is at the level of 0.80–0.82. Inbreeding in the herds was not detected, the Fis index has a negative value. The number of private alleles is 32 in the Hereford breed and 11 in the Kalmyk breed. The results obtained can be considered intermediate; for more convincing data, it is necessary to increase the studied population of the Kalmyk breed. 

Glanders, a contagious zoonotic and potentially fatal disease, is caused by the bacterium Burkholderia (B.) mallei. Horses, donkeys, mules and humans are susceptible to the pathogen. In the early to mid-20th century, glanders was eradicated in Europe, North America, Japan, Australia, and the USSR. In the countries of the Middle East, Asia, and South America, the disease became endemic. The development of international trade in horses contributed to the introduction of the pathogen with latent carrier equids to free regions, and in recent decades, outbreaks of glanders have been registered in disease-free countries, including Russia, as a result of which it began to be classified as a re-emerged disease. The ability of the pathogen to infect at low doses in aerosol form makes it a potential bioterrorism agent. This review shows the current distribution of glanders with regard to the increasing number of horses in countries with developed horse breeding and the risks of infection in Russia in order to increase the awareness of veterinary services and enhanced countermeasures against this disease.

The authors studied the effect of a phytobiotic based on a complex of essential oils on the cellular and humoral links of the immune system of broiler chickens against the background of vaccination against the Newcastle disease virus. The study was conducted on broiler chickens of the domestic cross "Smena 9" (experimental and control groups of 70 heads each) at a poultry enterprise in the Omsk region. Chickens of the experimental group with water additionally received a domestic phytopreparation "Phytogenics" consisting of a complex of essential oils of cinnamon, cloves, rosemary, thyme, Indian sesame and organic acids in a dose of 0.2 ml/l of water at the age of 1–7 days and 0.3 ml/l of water from day 8 to 38. At the age of 9 days, the poultry were vaccinated against the Newcastle disease virus. Blood samples were taken 6 and 18 days after the vaccination to study the indicators of cellular and humoral immunity. It was found that the phytobiotic had a greater effect on cellular immunity 6 days after the vaccination, which was expressed by an increase in the activity of cationic proteins 1.3 times, the level of spontaneous NST activity of neutrophils by 17.7%, the total number of lymphocytes 2.1 times, T lymphocytes 3.0 times, lymphocytes 1.8 times. The greatest impact on the humoral link of immunity was exerted 18 days after vaccination, which was accompanied by an increase in the bactericidal activity of blood serum by 23.4%, the average titer of post-vaccination antibodies (immunoglobulins G) – by 1.1 log2. Stimulation of natural resistance and adaptive immunity during vaccination against the background of the use of a complex of essential oils had a positive effect on the viability and productivity of poultry, contributed to an increase in the safety of broiler chickens by 4.3%, live weight by 3.4%. Taking into account the obtained results, the used herbal preparation can be recommended for increasing the immunological resistance, viability and productivity of broiler chickens.

The search for new types of feed to increase the final live weight and reduce the cost of feed for growing remains the main issue at the current stage of development of broiler production. The article presents the results of a study of the chemical composition and nutritional value of rapeseed cake, which receives special attention as the main component of compound feed in the finishing period of poultry fattening. The purpose of this work was to study the fattening and meat qualities of poultry when replacing sunflower meal, sunflower oil and meat meal in the diet with rapeseed cake, rapeseed oil and soybean meal in the same quantities. The quality of the feed eaten by the poultry has a great impact on the growth and feed costs indicators. According to the results of chemical studies it was found that the energy and protein nutritional value of rapeseed cake is close to soybean cake. The best results were obtained with the inclusion of rapeseed cake and oil in the compound feed. Thus, the viability of broiler chickens increased by 5.0%; live weight increased by 290 g. It was possible to achieve a reduction in feed costs per 1 kg of gain by 0.34 units and an increase in the productivity index by 2.1%. An important indicator of the quality of meat productivity of broiler chickens is the weight and yield of the edible part of the carcass. Thus, the mass of the gutted carcass was higher in the experimental group by 8.58% and the edible parts of the broiler carcass of the experimental group were higher by 122 g. The use of rapeseed cake and oil in the compound feed contributed to a decrease in the cost of 1 kg of live weight gain of broiler chickens and an increase in profit by 16.02% and an increase in the profitability of broiler meat production by 4.49%.

Fucose, a key component of intestinal glycans, plays an important role in regulating the microbial community and creating an optimal microenvironment for host epithelial cells. In this study, the effect of dietary fucose on the restoration of intestinal microbiota in mucin-2-deficient (Muc2–/–) laboratory mice after antibiotic therapy was investigated. Wild-type mice were used as controls (WT, C57BL/6). During the experiment, animals of both genotypes were divided into four groups: mice in group 1 did not receive antibiotics (negative control), representatives of group 2 received antibiotics (14 days) and fucose (positive control for fucose), group 3 received antibiotics (14 days) and standard feed (dysbiosis model), and group 4 received only fucose (main experimental group). The results of the study showed that Muc2–/– mice had significantly lower levels of bound fucose in the intestine than the control animals (p = 0.0001), which was accompanied by an imbalance in the microbiota. Antibiotic therapy aggravated these changes, reducing the number of Bacteroides spp. (p = 0.0003) and Lactobacillus murinus (p = 0.0268), while increasing the level of opportunistic Escherichia coli (p = 0.0004). Addition of fucose to the diet resulted in selective restoration of Bacteroides spp. in Muc2–/– mice (p = 0.0015), but had no effect on the number of L. murinus. An important finding was the indirect suppression of Enterococcus spp. by stimulation of Bacteroides, indicating complex intermicrobial interactions within the gut microbiome. It was also established that fucose reduced the level of E. coli (p = 0.0149), demonstrating its protective role. In C57BL/6 mice, fucose restored the level of bound fucose (p = 0.0249), whereas this was not observed in Muc2–/– mice, highlighting the key role of mucin-2 in maintaining microbial homeostasis. The obtained data reveal complex relationships between the mucin barrier, the composition of the microbiota and its resistance to antibiotics, opening up prospects for the development of new approaches to correcting the microbiocenosis in cases of intestinal barrier disorders.

The paper presents the results of research on the development of an algorithm based on a modern deep learning Convolutional Neural Networks model, which improved the accuracy of strawberry fruit recognition and classification of the degree of removable ripeness. The research utilized transfer learning method to adapt the used YOLOv10-M (You Only Look Once version 10 medium) model, originally trained on COCO dataset, to solve the task of strawberry berry ripeness degree classification. Image annotation (markup) was performed to create a training dataset. The Supervisely service was used, which allowed assigning appropriate classes to the selected areas of interest using rectangular frames. As a result of image annotation, 3 classes of garden strawberries of different maturity levels were identified: immature berry (class "unripe_strawberry"), mature berry (class "ripe_strawberry") and unripe berry (class "half_ripe_strawberry"). The unripe berry class included fruits that had less than 60% of the total red area in the image. Augmentation of the dataset, including operations such as cropping, resizing, rotation, vertical reflection, blurring, contrast variation, noise addition, random color correction, and addition of weather effects, increased the sample size to 4500 images. The YOLOv10-M model was trained on the created data sample, 500 epochs were used, the batch size was set to 8 (batch size). Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with an initial learning rate of 0.01 (learning rate) was chosen as the optimization algorithm. Analysis of the graphs and metrics of binary and multiclass classification to evaluate the quality of the model allowed us to determine the optimal settings and to select a confidence threshold (0.7) that achieves the best balance between accuracy (precision metric 0.93) and completeness (recall metric 0.89). The mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of recognition of the test sample images for all classes was 3.4%. The greatest difficulty in recognition occurred with the unripe berry class, for which the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) was 4.6%.

The article presents a small-sized combined unit equipped with tools and devices for restoring natural forage lands. Technology and design documentation have been developed, and a laboratory sample of the unit has been manufactured. Technical expertise and tests were carried out in the mountainous area of the Republic of North Ossetia – Alania at an altitude of 1,540 meters above sea level. The parameters of the test conditions and the functional parameters of the unit are determined: the tank volume, the tank capacity emptying coefficient, the actual dose of fertilizers, the required seeding rate, and the coefficient of seed compaction into the soil. The subject of the research was the technology and norms of seeding, design of the unit and the working bodies: pendulum seeding mechanisms, containers for liquid fertilizers. The main difference between the design of the block module is its small dimensions (a width of 2.4 m) and maneuverability in mountainous shallow-contoured areas. The laboratory sample of the unit complies with agrotechnical requirements and technical specifications. According to the calculations, the following were determined: the required tank volume Ec = 240 liters, tank emptying coefficient (Ko = 0.995), and it was found that it is necessary to do rolling of the seeds with double-row rollers, the weight of the sown seeds per one revolution of the roller is 2 g As a result, a combined small-sized unit has been manufactured that promotes the formation of a thicker herbage, prevents water and wind erosion of soils, reduces the degradation processes of sloping areas by improving the quality and quantity of perennial grasses in the form of high-quality feed and increases the productivity of agricultural landscapes and profitability of agricultural production by 15–20%.