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Article Request Page ASABE Journal Article Perspective: Preparing Leaders to Engineer Sustainability and Resilience Across the Food Chain Through the Grand Challenges Scholars Program
Richard K. Miller1, Yannis C. Yortsos2,*
Published in Journal of the ASABE 66(2): 393-396 (doi: 10.13031/ja.14915). Copyright 2023 American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers.
1Olin College of Engineering, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
2Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USA.
*Correspondence: yortsos@usc.edu
Submitted for review on 21 October 2021 as manuscript number NRES 14915; approved for publication as an Invited Perspective Article and as part of the Circular Food and Agricultural Systems Collection by Associate Editor Dr. Ana Martin-Ryals and Community Editor Dr. Kati Migliaccio of the Natural Resources & Environmental Systems Community of ASABE on 12 January 2023.
Highlights
- Addressing the complex political, economic, and societal challenges inherent in sustainable agriculture and food production requires interdisciplinary thinking and approaches.
- Relevant pedagogical models and extracurricular experiences can be provided by the Grand Challenges Scholars Program, now spread to nearly 100 universities globally.
- The complexities of agriculture and food production today can be addressed by future engineering leaders based on this program.
Abstract. The education of engineers and other professionals to address the global grand challenge of sustainable food production will require much more than excellent technical skills. New mindsets, human-centered design principles, and collaborative leadership skills will be required to develop leaders who will be successful in addressing the complex political, economic, and societal challenges inherent in sustainable agriculture and food production today. This will require supplementing—not replacing—the technical core of engineering education with new pedagogical models and extracurricular experiences. One such model that has proven effective in this area and has spread to nearly 100 universities globally is the Grand Challenges Scholars Program. This article explains how the complexities of agriculture and food production today can be addressed by future engineering leaders based on this program.
Keywords. Food chain, Sustainable agriculture.In 2008, the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE) identified fourteen Grand Challenges, which, if met, would make life on the planet more sustainable, secure, healthy, and enjoyable (National Academy of Engineering, 2008). Paralleling Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but for the world’s population at large, they were roughly categorized in terms of the four areas of sustainability, security, health, and life enrichment. Even though they are not explicitly identified as one of the Grand Challenges, sustainable agriculture, and food security, as the global population increases, fit clearly in the category of sustainability, as they encompass the fundamental topics of economics, energy, water, the nitrogen cycle and, increasingly, climate change.
Many of these concepts were echoed in the themes of the ensuing biannual meetings of three national academies, namely the Chinese Academy of Engineering, the US National Academy of Engineering, and the UK Royal Academy of Engineering. In fact, at the last such meeting pre-COVID, in September 2019, in London, UK, one of the key conference themes was “How to Feed 10 Billion People,” with the expectation being that soon the world population would reach that milestone (Royal Academy of Engineering, 2019).
In 2009, following the announcement in 2008 by the US NAE of the Grand Challenges for Engineering, three engineering institutions, the Duke University Pratt School of Engineering, the Olin College of Engineering, and the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, announced the creation of a program, the Grand Challenges Scholars Program (GCSP), designated to help in preparing the engineers who will solve the NAE Grand Challenges (Grand Challenges Scholars Program, n.d.). This article discusses how the GCSP can help prepare the leaders to address this complex system and is partly based on a presentation by Richard K. Miller available here (National Academy of Engineering, 2021).
Sustainable Agriculture Issues
Sustainable agriculture and food security are, by nature, complex systems. This does not mean that they are merely complicated; namely, they consist of multiple components, which, although large in number, are linearly, predictably, and deterministically interconnected. Or, that they are only complex in the sense of a physicochemical sequence of interdependence that is non-linear in nature and likely leads to complex behavior in the sense of non-linear dynamics. The additional complexity arises from the fact that they include a significant, essential human element, which introduces behavioral, economic, political, and societal dimensions and many unintended consequences. Such facets can only be addressed by interdisciplinary approaches that combine natural sciences and engineering along with behavioral, economic, social, and policy aspects (Sargut and McGrath, 2011).
While agriculture and food security remain critical matters of human activity and economic stability in much of the developing world, extraordinary technological advances in recent decades have enabled a significant reduction of these concerns in much of the developed world. Indeed, largely because of technology-enabled major advances in agricultural efficiency, the percentage of the US population involved in agriculture decreased from about 80% in 1800 to only about 2% of the US population in 2000 (Dimitri et al., 2005). As a result, few people are aware of the issues involved, and almost surely large segments of our population take all these processes for granted. As is the case with rapidly emerging phenomena, however, an increasing number of concerns appear on the horizon with an increasing and alarming frequency, which, coupled with altered supply chains, locally optimized decision-making, increasing populations, and rapidly appearing climatic changes, will likely bring up unanticipated attributes and potentially catastrophic consequences. Thus, sustainability cannot be simply and only viewed in terms of energy, water, and air but must also deeply incorporate agriculture, food supply, the economic system, and the looming effects of climate change.
A fundamental characteristic of the whole area of sustainability is its inherently global dimension, with perturbations in one part of the system propagating and being felt across its entirety. A corollary is a decision or policy-making in one part that can have strong ripple effects in another. And while engineering and technological solutions can ultimately be counted on to provide, and they will provide, the solution to many problems, human and political decision-making is often still locally optimal but globally inefficient or even counterproductive (Jones et al., 1998).
Consider decisions in agricultural food production in the US. These are made by individual farmers. With the average size of a US farm today being less than 500 acres, their financial viability is quite fragile (USDA-NASS, 2020).
For example, farmers in California are starved of water (Cowan, 2021; Fuller, 2021; James, 2022). The competition for water in urban areas like Los Angeles or with environmental coalitions intent on prioritizing biodiversity has forced farmers to reduce the percentage of land they can afford to plant, significantly reducing their financial viability. Thus, they have had to change crop selection to fit the shrinking availability of water. In fact, some are now considering permanently removing their land from food production in order to survive financially. For example, the New York Times recently reported that some farmers are considering selling their water rights to Los Angeles and installing solar panels to sell power to PG&E (Sengupta, 2021a, b). This may permanently reduce or eliminate the agricultural productivity of those farms, just when we need to rapidly increase global food production. We should add that the possible elimination of farming areas in California’s Central Valley is more significant than just the number of acres involved, as such land has been widely regarded as the most fertile food-producing land in the world. In fact, the Central Valley produces about 25% of the national needs in fruits and vegetables (House Committee on Natural Resources, 2015; Bittman, 2012).
The following example clearly shows the complexity of such systems and the interdependence of the many elements of sustainability: Reduced water supply in one part of the system due to drought or climate change-induced shortages can entice farmers to redirect their water resources for greater financial gain, thus reducing agricultural output. While increasing the supply of renewable energy through photovoltaic panel farms, whose output is dependent on increased surface area and will be in high demand, the availability of the arable land surface for agriculture decreases.
As in previous critical points in world history, competition for scarce resources, whether in water, energy, or food, has led to either confrontation and instability or to collaboration and prosperity (United Nations Peacekeeping, n.d.). As advances in science and technology have progressed, they have enabled new options that can help create equitable global solutions. Furthermore, they also often create new methods, products, and techniques that help decrease scarcity. In this way, the collaborative application of innovations in science and technology might possibly lead to abundance and ultimately resolve the conflict. It is here that educating the next generation of engineers and scientists can make a fundamental difference. Fortunately, we believe that such a program that encompasses all such important characteristics exists.
The Grand Challenges Scholars Program
In 2009, following the announcement in 2008 by the US National Academy of Engineering of the Grand Challenges for Engineering, three engineering institutions, the Duke University Pratt School of Engineering, the Olin College of Engineering, and the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, announced the creation of a program, the Grand Challenges Scholars Program (GCSP), designed to help in preparing the engineers who will solve the NAE Grand Challenges (Grand Challenges Scholars Program, n.d.). The largely outside-the-curriculum program emphasizes the development of mindsets, in addition to skills and competencies, along the following five areas: research and project learning; interdisciplinarity; innovation and entrepreneurship; cultural understanding; and societal consciousness (Katsouleas et al., 2013). This program, calling for the development of knowledge, skills, and mindsets, is now adopted by almost 100 engineering schools around the world. It is also ideally suited to address the challenge of sustainable agriculture, as well as other grand challenges that were not initially part of the original set of the NAE Grand Challenges.
The GCSP program was informed by two influential NAE Reports: The Engineer of 2020: Visions of Engineeringin the New Century, which argued that “to maintain the economic competitiveness of the [United States] and improve the quality of life for people around the world, engineering educators and curriculum developers must anticipate dramatic changes in engineering practice and adapt their programs accordingly;” and its 2005 sequel, Educating the Engineer of 2020, which expanded on the new attributes and abilities engineers will need “in a world driven by rapid technological advancements, national security needs, aging infrastructure in developed countries, environmental challenges brought about by population growth and diminishing resources, and the creation of new disciplines at the interfaces between engineering and science (National Academy of Engineering, 2004, 2005).”
The five competencies include:
- Research experience: Project or independent research related to a Grand Challenge.
- Interdisciplinarity or Engineering+: Preparing engineering students to work at the overlap with public policy, business, law, ethics, human behavior, and risk, as well as medicine and the sciences.
- Entrepreneurship: Preparing students to translate invention to innovation, to develop market ventures that scale to global solutions in the public interest.
- Global dimension: Developing the students' global perspective necessary to address challenges that are inherently global as well as to lead innovation in a global economy.
- Service learning: Developing and deepening students' social consciousness and their motivation to bring their technical expertise to bear on societal problems.
The GCSP is implementing the notion that engineering is the empowering discipline of our times; that it is a fundamental (if not the fundamental) ingredient in the convergence of disciplines; that engineers solve grand challenges; and that there is a need to “change the conversation” about engineering, engineering education, and the “face” of engineering. In short, to help define “who we are, what we do, and what we look like.” Indeed, the GCSP has been instrumental in attracting a much more diverse composition of students, almost half of whom are women.
We believe that the GCSP can ideally be suited to prepare our students to take on the important challenge of sustainable agriculture and food security. The recent example of the rapid development of vaccines against COVID that have dramatically altered the spread of the epidemic shows the extraordinary power of technology to generate solutions that scale. But as demonstrated in this example of the application of new vaccines against COVID, the technical solutions are effective only when widespread public acceptance of the new vaccines is also achieved. So, engineers must not only develop new technical solutions but also plan for methods to produce widespread public acceptance.
However, this enabling power needs to be directed toward solving societal problems in ways never imagined before, including addressing inequities and long-embedded societal biases as well as helping truly create a better world. Sustainable agriculture is one such crucial example, corresponding critically to human-centric technologies. This set of global problems, like other Grand Challenges, will necessitate the addition of contextual awareness of socio-technical systems to engineering as the "connecting" discipline, as well as the development of mindsets involving collaboration, interdisciplinarity, entrepreneurship, cultural awareness, compassion, and global perspectives.
These also dictate that we need to prepare students not only with appropriate competencies but also with mindsets of agility and adaptability, a deeper understanding of human cultures, and the purpose of developing and using technology for the good of humanity and the planet we inhabit. Such elements of ethical purpose are intertwined with what we might call ‘character’, which combines with ‘competence’ (knowledge and skills) to produce ‘trust’ (competence + character), which is much needed in today’s world (Covey and Merrill, 2006). We argue that all of these are encapsulated in the GCSP and appropriately re-interpreted. With unintended consequences due to human activity on the planet, the increasing power of technology can and has led to adverse, undesirable, and even catastrophic consequences. Competence, therefore, is not the only requirement for our graduates. They will also need character, to help limit such unintended consequences.
In closing, consider a particular pedagogical pilot as a specific GCSP project: establish a new project course in agricultural systems that involves forming teams of five to seven students from various disciplines, and not simply engineering students. Have them start by visiting (or Zoom calling) 10 farmers for at least two hours each to commence a “needs discovery” and adapt useful principles from approaches such as “lean startup methodology” in innovation and entrepreneurship to “human-centered engineering.” In such an approach, farmers will be the co-designers of the systems we will be working with. Indeed, the purpose of such visits will be to ask farmers to explain their challenges and their decision-making and to explore ideas for possible solutions. At the conclusion of these 20 hours of visits, the team will begin to understand the complexity and context of food production in the US.
The next phase of the project will be for the teams to brainstorm and develop a short list of possible experiments/pilot projects to suggest to the farmers for their further feedback in a second round of conversations. Then, after working together with the farmers to shape a chosen experiment to address their concerns, the students can look for ways to insert sustainability and environmental principles into the project. The hope is that this will result in one or two ideas that farmers will choose to actually implement. Such a concept for addressing severe societal problems has already been implemented at USC in the engineering class CEE 486 Innovation in Engineering and Design for Global Crises, which designs products, services, and technologies with a human-centered approach, closely working with people affected by global crises. It was documented in the PBS documentary Lives Not Grades, where engineering students addressed the needs of refugees in refugee centers. It is also among a number of pedagogical concepts in sustainability being explored at MIT in their NEET Program (PBS, 2021; New Engineering Education Transformation, 2020). These examples are an adaptation of the principles of Design Thinking, developed at Stanford to a possible course in sustainable agriculture.
References
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