From rmcdonald@HRR1.HORT.CRI.NZMon Feb 27 21:57:15 1995 Date: Tue, 28 Feb 1995 15:19:52 +1200 From: Rod McDonald To: sanet-mg@ces.ncsu.edu Subject: Engineering in Sustainable Ag I would like to introduce myself and my group to sanet. We are a group of 18 scientists and engineers working in agricultural research, partly funded by government and partly by farming industry groups. We are the main engineering R&D resource for horticultural and pastoral research in New Zealand. Our academic backgrounds include physics, mathematics and biotechnology as well as most of the engineering and electronics branches. We have close working relationships with scientists working in most biological areas. A lot of our work is directed at finding ways of operating large-scale agricultural industries with minimal or no use of chemicals. Agriculture here is taking consumer demand for greater health assurance very seriously, so funding for this kind of research is quite significant by NZ standards. Substantial changes to agricultural practice are being made, especially in horticulture, and increasingly these changes are being driven by the marketing boards which coordinate most of New Zealand's agricultural exports. A theme of our work is that sustainable farming usually requires more effort (physical and mental) than conventional farming, and consequently can be limited by the availability of human resources. The role of engineers is to make human resources go further by developing helpful tools and processes. Often our aim is to find a way of turning an uneconomic ideal into an economic reality. My group's current interests in the sustainable ag field include: Non-chemical fruit disinfestation Non-destructive high-speed grading of individual fruit for sweetness, defects and insect infestation Use of beneficial fungus and fungal extracts for control of undesirable fungal infections Practical use of pheromones for insect control (eg mating disruption) Non-spray herbicide application technology for control of rampant vines and trees (eg stream-blocking willows) Minimal-chemical weed control Automatic trapping for control of pest animals (a serious problem in New Zealand - our ancestors imported a lot of small animals but not the predators to keep them in check) Objective measurement of stress in free-ranging animals and during transportation Creation of micro-environments with shelter and reflective foils Minimizing use of insecticides and fungicides in large-scale production of exportable fruit Simple controlled-release systems for disease prevention in livestock ************************ Rod McDonald Engineer/scientist Horticulture and Food Research Institute, Hamilton, New Zealand Phone +64-7-8385675 work, +64-7-8552019 home, Fax +64-7-8385655 ************************