Innovative Engineering Education In The Wake Of Smart Agriculture. Revision Of The Agricultural Engineering Curriculum

Global developments request ever more productive agricultural production systems to ensure food security. Agricultural production must be environmentally, socially sustainable and economically efficient. Innovative digital technologies are central to sustainable production systems. This poses challenges to the education of agricultural engineers, as technologies for real world challenges result from highly interdisciplinary innovations. Agricultural engineering (AgEng) as academic discipline is not universally established, which leaves voids in educational curricula and formal training areas. A substantial conflictual dualism remains between the biological and engineering domains. There are currently no homogeneous pathways through which these domains merge on common scientific and cultural foundations, cumulating in consistent training areas. The diffuse institutional situation damages the position of AgEng as an academic discipline. The ambiguity of AgEng has become evident during the evolution of Smart Agriculture (SA), where digital technologies deeply interact with conventional agricultural technologies. In the course of rapidly spreading SA technologies, the present paper formulates a rigorous approach to defining competence formation in AgEng to integrate crosscompetences, which can be offered through lifelong learning (LLL) opportunities.