This award provides funding to support a workshop on Engineering Solutions for Specialty Crop Challenges to be held in Arlington, Virginia, April 24-25, 2007. Different segments of the specialty crop industry (e.g., wine/grape, citrus, apple, stone fruits, horticulture, etc.) have been organizing independently during the past several years to address critical research needs. However, because each segment, individually, only represents a relatively small portion of the overall specialty crop industry, many of their needs do not receive attention in national research programs. Consequently, those individual industry segments have created a research collective to examine common research needs across many different specialty crops. They have agreed that automation, robotics, precision agriculture, sensors, and other advanced technologies are needed to help their industries and its producers become more efficient, productive, and sustainable.
While other national efforts are underway to develop biological/horticultural solutions to some of these problems, this workshop will be focused primarily on engineering science and technology approaches. Workshop participants from the specialty crop industry, equipment manufacturing, academia, and numerous federal agencies; such as, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA), National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institute of Standards and Testing (NIST), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will seek to identify both fundamental engineering science and applied engineering needs that will demand support from agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the USDA, respectively. It is the specific objective of this workshop to enlist the combined expertise of the above listed workshop attendees to evaluate high priority specialty crop challenges to sustainability, and then develop a technology roadmap which will identify and prioritize a National engineering science research and development agenda for the specialty crops.
Engineering solutions in sensor technology, robotics, machine vision, remote sensing, controls, computational approaches, environmental protection and so on will be necessary in the future to insure that USA specialty crops can remain competitive in a growing global agricultural market, thus insuring a sustainable and secure USA specialty crop industries. As technological breakthroughs in fundamental science are discovered they will be incorporated into applied research and development programs, which will benefit the specialty crop industry and ultimately the American food chain. This workshop will seek to chart a course for Federal investments in specialty crop engineering science and technology for the next ten years.
