MONEY

New halls to help ISU ag engineers meet lofty goals

Donnelle Eller
deller@dmreg.com

AMES, Ia. — Iowa State University's newest buildings — Sukup and Elings halls — have agriculture written all over them, sometimes literally. Think the Archer Daniels Midland student center and Iowa Pork Producers Association learning community.

But the industry's support also carries over to the partnerships that supply students and faculty with the newest technology, software, farm and manufacturing equipment, and research opportunities. Think rows of green Deere & Co. diesel engines, Agco and Deere tractors, Ag Leader Technology monitors and software.

Backers raised $14.5 million to help build the $75 million ISU facilities.

Part of a $100 million biorenewables complex, Elings and Sukup halls — a combined 173,000 square feet — are home to more than 800 undergraduate and graduate students who "put engineering solutions to agricultural problems."

These are the students and faculty who want to develop the next new renewable energy, field robotics, small unmanned aircraft, and answers to Iowa's livestock odor and water pollution problems.

Those lofty goals were one reason ISU's Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering Department could no longer operate in a half-dozen facilities spread across the campus, said Steven Mickelson, the department's chairman.

Some of the labs and offices dated back to the 1920s, making it difficult both to attract and retain talented researchers and professors, he said.

"It was difficult to do collaborative research, even in our own department, we were so far apart," Mickelson said. Those physical barriers also made it difficult to land national grants.

"There's a great advantage to being in one building," he said. "Now faculty can interact on a daily basis, and talk about the research, talk about Extension, talk about teaching."

The two halls are connected by an 8,000-square-foot atrium. Major donors included Virgil Elings, a 1961 engineering graduate, and Sukup Manufacturing, the grain storage manufacturer in Sheffield.

On Thursday, the university will celebrate the opening of Elings and Sukup halls.

Mickelson sat down with the Register to answer questions about the new buildings and the work going on inside them.

Q: Explain some of the work the department encompasses. It seems very broad.

A: We're known for agricultural engineering ... so designing tractors, tillage equipment, harvesting equipment. We've been involved with that since the beginning. ... But we're engineers that work in almost every part of agriculture.

We're working on air quality related to animal production systems. We're working on systems to filter out the odors — some of that is biofilters, it might be chemical additives. We're working on animal safety — the air they breathe, the waste management control systems, how the animals interact, their behavior and how they move around facilities. It's a big part of a safe environment.

And we're working on the whole water quality side of things — nutrient management. How do we ensure that we're minimizing the amount of nutrients that are making their way to water bodies or minimize the amount of chemicals that evaporate into the environment? ...

We're involved in some of the hottest topics within the state — air quality, water quality, grain systems, machine systems, biological systems.

Q: How are you improving equipment?

A: Since we're in the middle of a lot of equipment manufacturing companies in the Midwest, it's helped us to serve those industries for many years.

A lot of the growth has been in the precision side, helping farmers be smart in planting — seed spacing, seed populations, knowing exactly where you're locating seeds, in what kind of soil, what kind of fertility levels. It's also about understanding weed pressures that are in the fields and using technology to identify the sources — or find an insect infestation — and do precision application of herbicides or pesticides.

We also do a lot on using corn stover to make ethanol. How do you harvest corn stover? How do you store the corn stover? How do you transport that, and process it?

Q: Where do robotics come into agriculture?

A: I see robotics being used more by companies like Monsanto or DuPont Pioneer, where you're creating robots to go out into research plots and do measurements on those plants. They can look at the stalk diameters, they can look at spacing, they can actually take a sample of the leaf, and look at the nutrients in the plant. How is it performing? What's the coloring look like? They can run through the rows, using 3-D imagery to build the characteristics that these companies are interested in.

A farmer might send a robot out and look at the conditions that are going on and store that data. It's the era of big data and figuring out what you can do with it.

Q: What role does the department and complex play in developing the Des Moines-Ames biosciences corridor?

A: We're collaborating with many companies. But one of the greatest resources they'll find are the students, both through internships and full-time employment. ... This corridor will be great in retaining students.

We're also working with companies on research. Of all the companies in the department of engineering, we have the highest percent of research funded through industry — over a third of our research. It's work with Deere, DuPont Pioneer, Monsanto, Ag Leader. That proximity allows us to do more development.

I have companies coming in almost every week to talk about research, how we can collaborate with them on research they're doing. How can we provide expertise. It's not just research but developing the next products they're going to use to help farmers be more productive.