Agricultural Sciences

This course explores key concepts in agricultural and food supply chain management such as forecasting, inventory management, sourcing and procurement, and logistics within the agrifood industry. The course provides an overview of agrifood supply chain management for students interested in the agrifood industry. 

Topics include understanding the supply chain, inventory management, cycle inventory, distribution networks, transportation, sourcing, sustainability, managing economies of scale, and case studies.  

This course is an integrated introduction to fruit, vegetable, cereal, dairy, and seafood and meat science and technology. It provides an overview of the traditional and innovative techniques that are used to protect the quality and assure the safety of these foods. 

The course introduces carbohydrates, proteins, lipids, vitamins, and minerals that are components of food, and examines basic science applied to food processing and storage (gelatinization, aging, denaturation, rancidity, flavor change, color change).  

This is a special studies course involving an internship with a corporate, public, governmental, or private organization, arranged with the Study Center Director or Liaison Officer. Specific internships vary each term and are described on a special study project form for each student. A substantial paper or series of reports is required. Units vary depending on the contact hours and method of assessment. The internship may be taken during one or more terms but the units cannot exceed a total of 12.0 for the year.

This course targets students specializing in animal science and animal production. The specific components addressed include the dairy enterprise/industry at farm, national, and international level - current position and future trends; sustainable production systems and environmental constraints on production; seasonality of production, product quality, and implications for processing and marketing; principles of dairy production and management practices as they relate to sustainable production systems, especially in relation to nutrition/feeding, breeding, reproduction; principles of disease control in dairy production systems with the main emphasis being on good practice in relation to disinfection, immunology, and animal care and welfare; and costs and returns and factors affecting profitability.

This course examines suitable nutrition to animals in order to obtain good animal health management. It covers estimating the nutritive value of feeds; estimating the nutrient requirements of animals and diet formulation. The focus is on building up knowledge on animal nutrition by assessments of nutritional adequacy and solving of nutritional problems, with a particular emphasis on wildlife and animals used in agricultural production systems.

This course examines introductory level scientific and engineering design concepts including sustainable development, and product and processing line management with an emphasis on sustainable manufacturing as the core theme throughout the course. A technical lecture series will demonstrate the integration of all aspects of food science and technology, and their underpinning by the basic sciences, through examination of a hypothetical company producing a selected food product.  

This is an independent research course with research arranged between the student and faculty member. The specific research topics vary each term and are described on a special project form for each student. A substantial paper is required. The number of units varies with the student’s project, contact hours, and method of assessment, as defined on the student’s special study project form.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. This course develops critical knowledge of the fundamental institutes of Food Law with particular attention to the new profiles that the discipline presents and to European and international regulations of specific relevance. The approach to the subject is interdisciplinary, not only theoretical but also practical-operational, enabling students to acquire mastery and awareness in the use of legislative, jurisprudential, and contractual practice tools. The course content includes: principles and rules of European and global food law; right to food; food security; food safety; food sovereignty; global food law trends; European food law rules; food sustainability; food law and antitrust rules; and contract farming. At the end of the module, the course covers the regulation of national, European, and international agrifood markets, with particular emphasis placed on agrifood security, producer responsibility, and competition policies; and how to handle different sources of agrifood law, how to be familiar with bodies issuing specific regulation in the sector, and how to contribute to organizational policies to this regard.

FQD633 is the first module of the online course on Product and Process Design. This first module focuses on the principles of consumer-oriented food product design. Group work is an essential part of this module. Deadlines are in place to ensure appropriate progress of the (group) work. The online course on Product and Process Design focuses on design aspects of food products from an integrated product and process perspective and aims at strengthening so-called T-shaped skills, i.e., the ability to tackle in-depth disciplinary technological problems in combination with the aptitude to deal with broad multi-disciplinary challenges. The online course on Product and Process Design is divided into four modules: FQD63303, FQD63403, FQD63503, and FQD63603.