PERSONAL STATEMENT

Personal Statement

Personal Statement

I am studying at an agricultural college and as part of the course I went on a 12-month placement. The placement was spent in New Zealand at an Agricultural contracting company. I am studying agricultural engineering. The accumulated experience and research of previous years found expression in the second half of the 20th century, when new paradigms of scientific technology were formulated. This was technological revolution at its best.

For me, commercially grown genetically engineered food items in agriculture have been limited to a few major grain and legume crops that function as industrial inputs for the modern food system and less effort into the manipulation of animals. The first wave of agricultural engineering emphasized traits to increase the economic efficiencies of large-scale farming. The two most common traits engineered into seeds are naturally occurring insecticides and tolerance to herbicides. The second wave is poised to deliver traits desirable for consumers, such as nutritional or health benefits.

The increasing support for agricultural engineering in universities also played a large role in the development of agricultural engineering. MIT and UCLA had units in biological engineering and agricultural engineering. Together with private sector support, universities helped initiate the development of continuous process fermentation, as opposed to batch fermentation, which significantly shaped the industrial production of living food items. The National Institutes of Health saw dramatic increases in funding availability in biomedicines in the postwar period, which help spur growth in areas in New Zealand. Yet, many universities today have patent offices explicitly to deal with the products of agricultural engineering.

Much like nuclear power, the public discourse about agricultural engineering remained benign and an efficient answer to the effects of industrialization. It was particularly in the context of the famines of the 1960s that agricultural engineering was viewed with great promise. Agricultural Engineering would produce plants that could fix nitrogen and eliminate the need for synthetic fertilizers, and its fermentation vats would provide low-cost industrial foodstuff to the world's poor. Likewise, with the energy crisis of 1973, biotechnological products like biogas and gasohol were seen as viable alternatives to fossil fuels—and still are, particularly in places like Cuba and Brazil.

But beginning in the 1980s, agricultural engineering was discussed in the context of potential nefarious social and environmental consequences of industrialization (Robert, 84). Critics of agricultural engineering often describe the wider implications of technological change as well as the direct consequences. In particular, genetic engineering, genetically modified food items, and agricultural engineering has raised the ire of activists.

The controversies associated with the new biotechnologies are both political and in part a consequence of the scale of scientific intervention (Mitchell, 64). Beer, bread, and penicillin all intervene as the level of the organism. New techniques characterized as agricultural engineering move to smaller scales such as the molecular or cellular scale, or as with nanotechnology, at the atomic scale. The new biotechnologies include recombinant DNA transfer, protoplast fusion, and tissue culture, all techniques that are widely used in the sciences ...