Making the World a Better Place: What the Agricultural Engineering Professional Organizations Can Do in the New Century to Make Good on Their Age-Old Promise

It was Bill Ford, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Ford Motors Company, who made the remark that “A good company delivers excellent products and services, while a great one delivers excellent products and services and strives to make the world a better place.” This statement remains strikingly true when adapted to engineering professional organizations, that is, “A good engineering professional organization delivers excellent products and services, while a great one delivers excellent products and services and strives to make the world a better place.” But have the few national and regional agricultural-engineering professional organizations around the globe striven properly in the last century to make the world a better place? The answer is both yes and no. It is yes as attested by the illustrious list of outstanding accomplishments of the profession in the 20th century published in 2000 by the American Society of Agricultural Engineers (ASAE) (Cuello and Huggins 2000). To wit: agricultural engineering has designed and developed technologies that ushered agricultural machineries into the farm; brought electrical power to the farm; conveyed and conserved soil and water resources on the farm; brought post-harvest operations to the farm; brought information technology to the farm; etc. The result was that the profession contributed appreciably in the significant increase in productivity of human labor on the farm, helping achieve the unprecedented spike in food production in the last century. But the answer is also no since despite – or in some cases even because -- of the foregoing technical accomplishments, millions of people today remain hungry and the degradation of the environment appears to have worsened. Thus, at the dawn of the 21st Century, the agricultural engineering profession faces up to the burden and the challenges of its significant and unfinished work.