Agricultural Engineering - Emphasis Area: Machine Systems Engineering

The food and mobile equipment industries need engineers with a background in mechanical design, electronics, manufacturing and assembly processes, instrumentation and control, sensors, biology, and quality control. From creating intelligent machines that plant, cultivate, and harvest crops, to designing forest machinery and soil sensors, to developing prescription farming technology, highly creative engineering is essential. Students will learn about analysis and design tools such as finite elements, CAD/CAM, solid modeling, and dynamic simulation. As a graduate of this curriculum, you will have excellent employment opportunities with a wide spectrum of manufacturers, consulting engineering firms, service industries and government agencies. For example, current graduates are developing new equipment, crop processing and handling machines, buildings and feed processing and handling equipment for animal agriculture, horticultural production facilities, construction and mining, forestry, lawn and ground care, and robotic applications in food and fiber production and processing.

In addition, exciting engineering opportunities exist in electro hydraulic control laser sensors, global positioning systems, geographic information systems, environmentally safe recyclable vehicles, human operator comfort and remote vehicle control.

Free electives are chosen to fulfill an academic plan of study. Typically students take additional engineering, management or courses just for fun. The basis of this Agricultural Engineering area of study provides machine systems engineers an education to enjoy their careers solving problems.

Design courses build individual confidence and are one-on-one with engineers who submit actual problems. Students also are familiar with group decision making and problem solving. We utilize alumni input to provide an education that has created a demand for our graduates.