UConn Engineers, Ag Students Aim To Get Innovative With State Farmers

STORRS, CT — The University of Connecticut is taking its agricultural roots to a new level.

With the support of a Unites States Department of Agriculture Higher Education Challenge grant, UConn's College of Engineering and the College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources are offering assistance to Connecticut farmers through a Small Farm Innovations Project.

The project encourages local farmers to pitch inventive ideas that would benefit their farm. If
selected, recipients will receive a participation stipend and be connected to a team of students,
faculty, UConn Extension educators and agriculture service providers.

"We're excited to be able to help local farmers explore ideas that will benefit the practical needs
of their agricultural ventures," says Tim Vadas, an associate professor and the director of the
environmental engineering program. "And at the same time, we can train our engineering and
agricultural students to work together on novel problems."

The Small Farm Innovations Project is the result of a grant called "Innovation on Small Farms
Through a Project-based Learning Curriculum," and established and directed by Vadas and Gerald
Berkowitz, professor of horticulture in the Department of Plant Science and Landscape
Architecture.

The project is conducted in partnership with the New Connecticut Farmer Alliance, the Connecticut Resource Conservation and Development Area, and the UConn Extension's
Solid Ground program, which offers in-person training and e-learning tools for new and
beginning farmers.

Vadas, a faculty member in the agriculture school's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, said the USDA grant is worth $720,000. One goal of the grant is to encourage alternative career paths in agricultural technology to help ensure a competent, qualified, and diverse workforce will exist to serve the food and agricultural sciences system.

"We are recruiting senior design projects from farmers who will be paired with students from
CoE and CAHNR to work on them throughout next year," said Vadas, who has taught senior
design for eight years.

In 2020, three mechanical engineering majors — Kylie Kearney, Justin Gallo, and Andrew
Alaba — worked on a similar senior design project to benefit the productivity for Cloverleigh
Farm, a 2-acre certified organic farm in Mansfield. Susan Mitchell, the farm’s owner,
would painstakingly separate her beans from the pod by putting them in a bag and whacking
them against the ground. Although a commercial bean thresher would be ideal, it would cost
upwards of $100,000. The engineering students worked with Mitchell to design a customized
bean thresher using only locally sourced materials.

After many design iterations, the team came up with a gravity-based device where the beans slide down an angled ramp, pass through a series electric-powered rotating threshers, continuing to an automatic sorting mechanism at the bottom.

"It's ideas like these that we’d like to help local farmers bring to life," Vadas says.

Applicants must be a production farmer located in Connecticut and have at least one year of
production experience operating their own farm business. The project is intended for farmers
who are currently, or are working toward, financially supporting themselves through their
agricultural careers.

If selected, farmers must be able to meet weekly or twice monthly with the student team (three to
five engineering and agriculture students), participate in surveys and an interview related to their
experience, and participate in the Farm hack event hosted by New CT Farmers Alliance annually
in January.

An application form can be accessed here.