Harper Adams University - Prospectus 2024

After travelling to Germany in November 2022 for the CLAAS Foundation award ceremony, three Harper Engineering graduates (two of which studied Agricultural Engineering) left with coveted Helmut CLAAS Scholarships and prizes. Taking home winnings worth €7,800 between them, the ceremony is designed to mark the achievements of students from agricultural and engineering faculties, in recognition of their outstanding final theses. With works entitled ‘Maize Belongs to the Farmer, Not the Field’ and ‘Improved Nutrient Management for Food Production’, MEng Agricultural Engineering graduates, Richard Geary and James Shaw respectively, came away victorious. James, who held Alamo and Douglas Bomford Trust scholarships while at Harper Adams, investigated the mechanical durability of digestate pellets in his thesis. The CLAAS award was the second time his work had secured a prize after he was named winner of the Institution of Agricultural Engineers CNH Industrial Undergraduate Award 2021 earlier that year. Accompanying the prize winners was Head of Engineering, Parmjit Chima. Speaking on the event, Parmjit said “I am delighted with the success of our three engineering students who were presented with awards from the CLAAS Foundation for their final year dissertations - in the face of stiff competition from candidates at universities across the globe.” “The award of the Helmut Claas Scholarship prize is a testament to the ethos of engineering programmes delivered by the University that are applied in nature, and very much aligned to meeting present and future challenges faced by the industry and the farming sector as a whole.” 35-hectares of automated machines, growing crops autonomously, without operators in the driving seat or agronomists on the ground – that’s the premise of our Hands-Free Farm; the first of its kind in the world. The Hands-Free Farm follows on from the Hands- Free Hectare, which has been running at the University, in conjunction with Precision Decisions, since October 2016. The team behind the project successfully harvested their first crop, 4.5 tonnes of spring barley, in September 2017 and 6 tonnes of winter wheat a year later! "Autonomous farming is an early area of development, thriving off new ideas and concepts that push the limits of what is currently available and accessible for farmers in the market," says Callum Chalmers, Business Development Manager at Farmscan AG UK. “With [more] years to innovate and set the tone of what is possible in autonomous farming, we are looking at an excellent foundation for the future." Read more here. WorldCLAAS Engineers World’s First Hands Free Farm HARPER.AC.UK | 55