By Marianne LaCount
Earlier this spring, CSU engineering students competed in interdisciplinary teams during the Ag-A-Thon, an agricultural-focused competition run by first-year faculty, Bailey Banach, and sponsored by the Director of Agriculture Innovation at CSU Spur, Jordan Lambert. Students showcased their knowledge of engineering solutions to solve challenging agricultural problems in a hands-on way.
Addressing agricultural challenges
CSU Spur worked closely with students involved in Ram Ventures, a student organization, on the initiative. They worked closely with farming associations to identify the largest needs in agriculture and how CSU engineering students could work with students in other disciplines to address those gaps.
“Farming associations have provided us with real, unsolved challenges, and we’re bringing together students from engineering, business, computer science, and natural resources to collaborate on practical solutions,” said Jay Suthar, CSU mechanical engineering student and co-founder of Ram Ventures. “Our goal with this event, is to create a structured, interdisciplinary environment where students can work on meaningful, real-world problems.”
Students had the opportunity to compete in one of five agriculture-related engineering design challenges:
- Making composting easier by automating the turning process
- Preventing disease in wine grapes by retrofitting UV equipment to work on the Western Slope
- Keeping ranchers safe by helping automate hay feeding on truck beds
- Reducing potato waste by unlocking circular economy for growers on the Western Slope
- Helping ranchers restore forests by providing automated path clearing services to unlock undergrowth-grazing for livestock-mediated forest remediation
“Agriculture is the place where everything comes together – biology, mechanical engineering, business, computing, communications,” said Jordan Lambert, Director of Ag Innovation at CSU Spur. Farmers and ranchers can’t run their operations without knowing about all of these areas, and ag innovations won’t work unless they are informed by all of these areas. Ag itself is fundamentally interdisciplinary, so ag innovations have to be too.”
Source : colostate.edu