Description

Agricultural sciences, sciences dealing with food and fibre production and processing. They include the technologies of soil cultivation, crop cultivation and harvesting, animal production, and the processing of plant and animal products for human consumption and use. Agricultural production presents many engineering problems and opportunities. Agricultural operationsósoil conservation and preparation; crop cultivation and harvesting; animal production; and commodities transportation, processing, packaging, and storageóare precision operations involving large tonnages, heavy power, and critical factors of time and place. Facilities designed to aid farm operations help farm workers to minimize the time and energy requirements of routine jobs. In recent years, the application of mechanization in agricultural production has contributed to solving the hard labour stage, ensuring seasonality, increasing labour productivity and reducing post-harvest losses. The application of high technology in agriculture is also increasingly being replicated such as greenhouse and net house systems combined with the application of digital technology for automatic or semi-automatic control; the application of BigData, IoT, AI in managing crops and livestock, economical irrigation technology including drip irrigation, semi-automatic or automatic misting irrigation according to time or measured humidity and temperature; the application of non-soil farming techniques: hydroponics, growing plants on substrates. The text provides a broad-spectrum overview of the agricultural industry and the industry-based sciences, including basic principles of science as they apply to plants, animals, soils and foods.