Education & Outreach

During his recent seminar, Dr. Yiannis Ampatzidis brought up some compelling arguments. According to Ampatzidis, the first agricultural revolution came with mechanization. The second revolution brought agrochemicals such as fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides. The third ushered in genomics and genetic modification. And the fourth, the introduction and incorporation of smart agriculture, digital farming, internet of things, robotics, and artificial intelligence is just beginning.

"We slept a lot of nights in the back of a pick-up truck waiting for the harvester to break down," Mr. Paul F. Burkner said with a smile during his recent seminar for the Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering's Winter Seminar Series. In 1979, during those early days of Agricultural Industrial Manufacturing Incorporated (AIM, Inc.), it wasn't too difficult to find Mr. Burkner and his business partner Claude E. Brown, if you knew the color of his truck and which vineyard was harvesting.

Over the past ten years, Peruvian agriculture has transformed. The industry has blossomed an, approximately, $2 billion industry in 2007 to over $7 billion in 2018.

According to Manuel Lopez Ortiz, the Director of the Master's degree program in agribusiness and Ph.D candidate at the University of Piura, Peru, this dramatic increase is due to a number of strategies that have been implemented in the last decade.

People in the United States and Europe lose and waste about as much food as the entire food production of Sub-Saharan Africa. Are the people in developing countries simply better at food handling and consumption than those in developed countries? Why is it, then, that smallholder farmers, especially those in developing countries, around the world suffer from food insecurity? How can we reduce some of the 1,300,000,000 tons of food lost or wasted global per year?

Words like SmartAg, Precision Agriculture, and Digital Agriculture are quickly becoming everyday parts of Biological and Agricultural Engineering programs around the nation. To meet the food insecurities and sustainability challenges of tomorrow, it is increasingly necessary to ensure students at the university level are being well prepared in SmartAg.

"Good design and good engineering need each other," mentioned Don Osias during the latest Biological and Agricultural Engineering Department's Winter Quarter Seminar Series. As he spoke, it became clear that the good design Don spoke of extended beyond the products he built and into Applied Instrumentation, the agricultural products business he created.

There are clues about how to preserve food and keep it safe that based on nature inspired approaches if we look hard enough for them. Professor Nitin, in the latest in the Biological and Agricultural Engineering Winter Quarter Seminar Series, discussed this topic and how he has applied it in his work.

Professor Nitin started off with a carrot. A simple food that leaves questions unanswered when one takes the time to look more closely at it.

Transitioning from college life to a career is rarely the easiest move to make in life. After graduation there is a world of possibilities, but often times there are few roads to walk down and almost never any doors held open. It is something all graduates eventually have to go through and during the Winter Quarter Seminar Series’ first event, Jennifer Payne‐Strimaitis, discussed how she built the road to her career.

From 2012 to 2017, an unprecedented approximately 129 million trees have died in California's forests. When this is coupled with overcrowding stemming from 20th century forest management practices, a picture of California's forests begins to emerge that underscores the sheer volume of forest biomass.