Teaching Sustainable Farming as a New Engineering Discipline

Abstract

With a worldwide emphasis on sustainable farming to meet the food requirements of the growing population, there is a parallel need to develop a future workforce adept to meet the challenges in agriculture. Developing new curriculum and laboratory course projects around the theme of sustainable farming is challenging and constantly evolving. In this article, we review some of the important topics in sustainable farming that could be formatted at separate courses within a new curriculum. Some important topics on which courses have been developed are topics on soil health, soil conservation, water management, irrigation systems, energy efficiency, and biodiversity. There are interesting and valuable projects that are being taught as laboratory courses across universities, such as methods for soil analysis, soil properties measurements, assessment of irrigation systems, and socio-economic analysis of engineering systems. Data science and data management are cross-cutting topics that penetrate every sub-topic of sustainable farming. Overall, this article presents a good overview of curriculum being developed around sustainable farming which will help draw the attention of students into this field. It is expected that existing curriculum could be adapted and tailored to the vision of sustainable agriculture while also considering the student expectations and demands of the local and regional economy.