Agricultural Engineering

Environmental engineer Dr. Suzelle Barrington offers suggestions on changing the engineering workplace to encourage diversity. Government policies and programs to encourage the employment of workers with diverse backgrounds are a start. Bosses should be able to use human resources personnel to improve workplace environments. But there are subconscious biases still out there, some consulting firms still give the big jobs to the guys, for example. It is necessary to reminde people that such subconscious biases exist.

Agricultural engineer and public servant Christine MacKinnon describes her first engineering job, designing farm buildings in Nova Scotia. She and her boss travelled to a lot of farms, where she was frequently told "you don't look like the last engineer that we had out here!" She quickly recognized techniques necessary to earn the trust of farmers. She also recalls, as a woman starting in the profession, "a lot of old attitudes". There were incidents that would be described today as "extremely sexist", that she would resolve with humour. She attributes the reluctance of individuals to work with her to her inexperience and not her gender – but she has also worked to encourage young women to pursue engineering careers.

Agricultural engineer Yves Choinière describes his work, facilitating the production of food – vegetables, forage for livestock – with a specialty in the design of farm buildings and livestock housing. His work is very diverse: it includes environmental protection and integrating a number of mechanical, control, robotic, and other systems to produce food. Every kind of food – tomatoes, potatoes, root vegetables that grow in soils, fruits – requires a unique specialized treatment. The advances of automation and robotics in agriculture, particularly over the past two decades, has been remarkable.

Christine MacKinnon recalls loving math and biology when she finished high school, and so took agricultural engineering, two years at Nova Scotia Agricultural College and then finishing at Macdonald College at McGill. Her first job after graduation was designing farm buildings in Nova Scotia, but she soon moved to Saskatoon to do a Masters degree at the University of Saskatchewan studying ventilation efficiency in small rooms with Professor Ernie Barber. She then took a job in Prince Edward Island designing farm buildings. She joined the PEI Department of Environment in 1988 as an air quality and hazardous material engineer, working on acid rain and trans-boundary pollutants in an intergovernmental environment. She worked part-time while her daughter was little, and took on consulting work as a strategic planner. She returned to full-time work as PEI's Director of Corporate Policy, and was assigned to implement 40 recommendations to improve land use and environmental protection in PEI. She now works as the Director responsible for Municipal Governance. She describes her mentors – her first boss, Larry Honey in Nova Scotia, Ernie Barber, and, later, through her volunteer service on the Canadian Engineering Memorial Foundation, Suzelle Barrington and Elizabeth Cannon. She serves as a Warden of Camp 27, which organizes the Iron Ring Ceremony for UPEI graduates, and is active in WISE, the Women in Science and Engineering group.

Dr. Suzelle Barrington was the first Canadian woman to receive a doctorate in agricultural engineering from Macdonald Campus at McGill University. She grew up on a farm near Moose Creek, a half hour east of Ottawa, and, after a year of science at Carleton University, switched to agricultural engineering at McGill. She was turned down for her first job with the Government of Ontario because she was a woman, but got a job as an agronomist in Howick Quebec. She got a job as an agricultural engineer in 1978 in Huntington, and worked hard to improve the productivity of her team. She returned to Macdonald Campus to do graduate studies, receiving a PhD in 1985, and continued there as a professor. Her doctoral research was on means to seal wastewater in soils. She continued on with odor control, building an Olfactometer to expose individuals to odors in a controlled manner, and so developing standards to quantify acceptable concentrations of odor in waste or factory discharges to the atmosphere. She developed a system for anaerobic digestion of wastewater, sludge, or livestock manure that did not require an expensive digestor. She has also worked extensively to promote engineering to women and generally increase the diversity of engineers, serving as President of the Women in Engineering Committee of the Quebec Order of Engineers. In "retirement", she has just finished writhing the history of subsurface drainage in Quebec, which dates from approximately 1920. She expresses her concerns about the amount of waste, including food waste, generated annually in Canada, and about environmental degradation and its impact on climate change. She closes with advice to a high-school student considering a career in engineering, and to a newly graduated Engineer-in-Training.

Agricultural engineer Yves Choinière describes his work – he considers himself generalist who applies technology from many engineering disciplines to the creation of food. Over the past two decades, farming has been transformed by automation – for example: monitoring animal well being, milking robots, feeding robots in milk production; GPS-controlled tractors that optimize seeding, fertilizer or pesticide spraying. He works with specialists from civil engineering, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, food, chemical and food processing engineers. He selected a career in agricultural engineering because, he wanted to be an engineer and grew up on a farm – he still owns and operates a farm. He recalls the small, not very efficient, farms of the '80s and the re-engineering of farm production that was necessary to reduce workloads and enhance quality of life and productivity. At the time there was a deficit in Canadian food projection – Canada was not producing enough beef, chicken, vegetables and fruits to satisfy its own needs. He describes the development of natural ventilation systems for livestock housing, returning to the University of Ottawa to earn a Masters degree, supervised by Professor Tanaka, using wind engineering to develop systems for farm buildings. After a decade with the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food, he returned to Quebec to assume control of the family farm near Granby from his father. He started a private consulting company that rapidly grew - largely in response to the need for modern agricultural enterprises to be efficient – prices have not really changed over the past 40 years but costs have markedly increased.