User:Charlesreid1/Agricultural engineering

Link to original article: Agricultural engineering

=Notes on Outline=

Follow Chemistry page outline:
 * Etymology
 * History
 * Principles/Concepts
 * Practice
 * See also
 * References

=Agricultural Production Systems=

History of World Agriculture
Agriculture
 * Long history of agriculture - dating back to irrigation farming
 * Agriculture engineering was one of the first engineering disciplines and is most "practical"
 * Percentage of world's population engaged in agriculture
 * Economic weight of agriculture, largest industry, will remain so, importance
 * Agriculture is about the continual creation of resources from nature in sustainable way
 * create organic matter from solar and other natural materials
 * utilize material cycles in nature

What is ag engineering?
 * Engineer applies scientific principles to processes
 * Agricultural engineers apply scientific principles to agricultural processes by optimizing the use of land, machinery, infrastructure, systems, and human resources to maximize output
 * Use of machinery to multiply power and increase capable production
 * Processing technology can reduce food loss and increase food value
 * Ag increasing in importance, also taking on other roles (providing food, biofuels, organic feedstocks, medical ingredients)

Scale of World Agriculture
Scale of agriculture?
 * World water consumption:
 * Ag = 69% of water consumption in world
 * Ag = 88% water consumption in Africa
 * Ag = 49% of water use in north and central america
 * Europe: ag is lowest 33%, industrial is highest 54%
 * Nitrogen fertilizers
 * Haber-Bosch process
 * Extraction of nitrogen for production of fertilizer enabled feeding the global population explosion
 * Sizable percentage of person's bodymass is nitrogen extracted from air using this process, fed to plants through fertilizer, and appearing in our bodies via food from store

Studying Agriculture
Goals of agriculture?
 * The main activity of agriculture is the production of food.
 * Agriculture must ensure continual sustainable basis

What is agriculture about?
 * Central principle of agriculture is the continual creation of resources from nature in a sustainable way. Agriculture utilizes natural resources and cycles, and human participation can have an affect on those cycles.
 * Agriculture is the practice of cultivating the soil, harvesting crops, rasisng livestock to produce plants and animals useful to human beings.
 * Forestry and fisheries are excluded.

Classifying Agricultural Systems
The type of agricultural system dictates the particulars of the engineering. For example, rice farming in Vietnamese paddies is different from cattle ranching in West Texas, although both are agriculture.

Agricultural systems can be classified using several different characteristics:
 * Social attributes (land holdings, employers, ownership)
 * Operational attributes (labor intensity, chemicals, irrigation, etc)
 * Production attributes (productivity, commercialization)
 * Structural characteristics (land type, crop types)

Agricultural Systems, Nature, and Humans
The agricultural system can be divided into two parts. The first is the interface between agricultural production and nature - the utilization of natural resources to produce products useful for human consumption. The second is the interface between the producers of those useful products and the rest of human society. The application of scientific principles (the heart of agricultural engineering) is useful in both realms.

=Applications of Agricultural Engineering=

Production End: Agricultural Engineering and Nature
Natural resource cycles: The agricultural engineer is concerned with the efficient and sustainable use of natural resources to produce agricultural products. The most important of these resources is water, and engineering systems for the efficient and adequate delivery of water. Agricultural engineers are also concerned with soil conservation, preserving nutrients in rich topsoil and using techniques like crop cycling. The nitrogen cycle and chemistry of the soil are strongly affected by the application of fertilizers and chemicals to crops. Agricultural engineers design systems to conserve these resources and optimize food production. They are also concerned with quantifying, limiting, and removing chemicals introduced to local ecosystems, as well as into global material and waste cycles.

Crop protection: At the small scale, a variety of factors may affect individual crop plants in ways both harmful (destructive insects, invasive crop diseases, weeds, weather) and helpful (beneficial insects, crop cycling, genetic modification, fertilizers and chemicals). Agricultural engineers design farming and livestock systems to scale up while still providing the right balance of resources and without creating permanent damage to the local ecosystem or the global environment. This requires a quantitative understanding of the environment, which requires careful study.

Waste management: Agricultural engineers must make agriculture sustainable and scalable. This is done by increasing the efficiency of raw materials utilized, and by better utilizing waste streams, by re-utilizing them or upcycling them into byproducts.

Farm machinery and management: Tractors and farm machinery have enabled huge advances in the amount of agricultural productivity per worker. The agricultural engineer's role in keeping tractors operational is critical to farm production. This requires an understanding of mechanical drive systems; internal combustion systems; electrical systems; hydraulic systems; and fluid mechanics.

Farm structure and systems optimization: Production of food at the scales required to feed massive populations requires massive farms, and that requires the efficient allocation of resources for logistics and supply. Agricultural engineers manage systems at the farm scale, creating mathematical models for them to understand the impact of changing variables in the process.

Consumption End: Agricultural Engineering and Society
Farm and food processing: Food processing of agricultural products is often performed close to the farm, to make processing more economical and to allow products to stay fresh for as long as possible before reaching market. This means that agricultural engineers are often found working in industrial processing facilities, such as meat packing facilities, fruit and vegetable bagging plants, and industrial microbial facilities.

Logistics and shipping: The use of computers and technology to track farm assets and quantify the agriculture system is not a new phenomena - margins in farming have always been slim, and bookkeeping has always been crucial to allowing farmers to make a living. Computers and technology have made it easier to gain a much more nuanced view, however, of the entire farm, from the seed in the ground to a head of lettuce or jar of jam at the market.

Global environmental impact: Agricultural engineers play a crucial role in making agricultural production sustainable and capable of supporting future population growth. Agriculture production represents a sizable percentage of the world's water consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. While the global food supply has the immediate impacts of composing the food that we eat and the material that we are ultimately made of, it also has long-term impacts on the viability of population growth.

Economics and policy decisions: Decisions about agricultural price floors or ceilings, subsidies, and other economic and policy decisions are complex and affect the entire economy: the rich and the poor, producers and consumers. These decisions must be made by informed decision-makers, who often require someone with a high-level understanding of farm operations. Agricultural engineers can therefore serve as a technical liaison between the farm and policymakers, contributing a quantitative understanding of farm operations and of what is technically feasible.

Commodity pricing: Like with policy makers deciding about agricultural economic or policy matters, producers trying to determine prices for their goods need a quantitative understanding of a farm's operations.

Technical legislation: Agriculture was formerly and still remains, for better or worse, one of the simplest levers the government can pull to adjust the economy. As a result, governments often make legislation concerning farms that detail very specific technical requirements on a huge variety of topics: production quotas, environmental regulation, water use, farm laborer and worker health rules, farm equipment import and export costs, agricultural goods import and export prices, farm size, animal treatment, genetic modification, endangered species protection, and foodborne illness.

=Practice=

Because of the unique, applied nature of agricultural engineering, training in the subject may range from the applied (how to dig a ditch, for example, or self-taught tractor repair knowledge) to the theoretical (applying graduate-level statistics to optimize production and resource distribution in a million-acre mega-farm).

Many community colleges offer technical certifications in agriculture-related fields. Many universities also offer Bachelors degrees in agricultural engineering. (NOTE: Preserve existing ABET links and information/wording existing on page.) Graduate programs in agricultural engineering are, like environmental engineering, more rare. Typically graduate work in these departments is interdisciplinary.

An agricultural engineering training program often begins with trade skills that require limited theoretical understanding, and are limited in scope (learning to change the oil on a tractor, or how to dig a canal, for example). As training proceeds, more engineering rigor is introduced to the curriculum, and students begin to use rational and abstract thinking to generalize problems, quantify systems, and think at larger scales.