Engineering Commons^™

Persistence And Mitigation Of Antibiotic Resistance In Manure And Manure-Amended Soils, Mara J. Zelt

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The emergence of antibiotic resistance (AR) is a growing global threat to human and animal health. The work described here asses the AR mitigation potential of management strategies at critical control points in livestock production, and agricultural land management as well as the effectiveness of a communication strategy to convey research-based information to empower behavioral change that could mitigate AR.

The first study evaluates the impact of beef cattle diet management strategies on AMR prevalence in manure. Two treatments – forage concentration and essential oils – in cattle diets were evaluated for their impact on AMR bacteria in feedlot manure. …

Flex-Ro: A Robotic High Throughput Field Phenotyping System, Joshua N. Murman

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Research in agriculture is critical to developing techniques to meet the world’s demand for food, fuel, fiber, and feed. Optimization of crop production per unit of land requires scientists across disciplines to collaborate and investigate new areas of science and tools for data collection. The use of robotics has been adopted in several industries to supplement labor, and accurately perform repetitious tasks. However, the use of autonomous robots in commercial agricultural production is still limited. The Flex-Ro (Flexible structured Robotic platform) was developed for use in large area fields as a multipurpose tool to perform monotonous agricultural tasks.

This work …

Predicting Agricultural Implement Hydraulic Power Demand Using Synchronized Controller Area Network And Ancillary Sensor Data, Gabriel P. Stoll

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

As agricultural implement designs have progressed in recent years, there has been an increase in hydraulic power demand from the tractor. Current power estimation standards do not accurately estimate hydraulic power demand for implements designed with higher hydraulic power requirements. Several stakeholders, including agricultural producers, tractor and implement manufacturers, and government agencies would benefit from accurate published data on these power requirements.

While an increasing amount of operational data available on the Controller Area Network (CAN) of tractors has assisted researchers in more easily obtaining machinery performance data, hydraulic control valve flow rate and pressure measurements are not currently publically …

Enhancing Single Walled Carbon Nanotube Deposition For The Study Of Extracellular Analytes, Joseph A. Stapleton

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Extracellular signaling is a dynamic process responsible for coordinating large scale biological processes. As such, understanding extracellular signaling is important to our determination of normal function and pathophysiological development. High resolution spatial and temporal information are critical to completely understanding these processes. Unfortunately, current methods of detection are lacking in either spatial or temporal resolution of extracellular products, limiting researchers’ ability to understand complex biological processes. A new group of sensors based on fluorescent single walled carbon nanotubes (SWNT) have shown the potential to provide both high quality spatial and temporal resolution for the sensing of analytes. However, while SWNT …

Adding Value To Lignocellulosic Biorefinery: Efficient Process Development Of Lignocellulosic Biomass Conversion Into Polyhydroxybutyrate, Mengxing Li

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB) is bacteria synthesized polymer that has comparable mechanical properties as petroleum-based plastics and high biocompatibility. Current commercial PHB production process is not cost effective. Raw materials make up about 50% of the production cost. Lignocellulosic biomass are cheap, abundant feedstocks that can be converted into PHB to add profit and sustainability to lignocellulosic biorefinery. Lignocellulosic biorefinery upstream process produces polymeric sugar rich stream and lignin-enriched stream. Polymeric sugars are then hydrolyzed into a sugar stream with glucose, xyloseand arabinose mainly present. To the best of the author’s knowledge, limited studies have been done on sugar mixture conversion into …

Mid To Late Season Weed Detection In Soybean Production Fields Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle And Machine Learning, Arun Narenthiran Veeranampalayam Sivakumar

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Mid-late season weeds are those that escape the early season herbicide applications and those that emerge late in the season. They might not affect the crop yield, but if uncontrolled, will produce a large number of seeds causing problems in the subsequent years. In this study, high-resolution aerial imagery of mid-season weeds in soybean fields was captured using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and the performance of two different automated weed detection approaches – patch-based classification and object detection was studied for site-specific weed management. For the patch-based classification approach, several conventional machine learning models on Haralick texture features were …

Design, Development, And Field Testing A Visnir Integrated Multi-Sensing Soil Penetrometer, Nuwan K. Wijewardane

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The research community in soil science and agriculture lacks a cost-effective and rapid technology for in situ, high resolution vertical soil sensing. Visible and near infra-red (VisNIR) technology has the potential to be used for such sensor development due to its ability to derive multiple soil properties rapidly using a single spectrum. Such efforts must, however, overcome a few challenges: (i) a dry ground soil spectral library that can be used to predict the target soil properties accurately, (ii) a robust design which can acquire high quality VisNIR spectra of soil, (iii) an effective method that can link field intact …

A Multi-Sensor Phenotyping System: Applications On Wheat Height Estimation And Soybean Trait Early Prediction, Wenan Yuan

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Phenotyping is an essential aspect for plant breeding research since it is the foundation of the plant selection process. Traditional plant phenotyping methods such as measuring and recording plant traits manually can be inefficient, laborious and prone to error. With the help of modern sensing technologies, high-throughput field phenotyping is becoming popular recently due to its ability of sensing various crop traits non-destructively with high efficiency. A multi-sensor phenotyping system equipped with red-green-blue (RGB) cameras, radiometers, ultrasonic sensors, spectrometers, a global positioning system (GPS) receiver, a pyranometer, a temperature and relative humidity probe and a light detection and ranging (LiDAR) …

In Vivo Human-Like Robotic Phenotyping Of Leaf And Stem Traits In Maize And Sorghum In Greenhouse, Abbas Atefi

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In plant phenotyping, the measurement of morphological, physiological and chemical traits of leaves and stems is needed to investigate and monitor the condition of plants. The manual measurement of these properties is time consuming, tedious, error prone, and laborious. The use of robots is a new approach to accomplish such endeavors, which enables automatic monitoring with minimal human intervention. In this study, two plant phenotyping robotic systems were developed to realize automated measurement of plant leaf properties and stem diameter which could reduce the tediousness of data collection compare to manual measurements. The robotic systems comprised of a four degree …

Tailoring Cell-Material Interactions Via Poly(Acrylic Acid) Brushes To Enhance Nonviral Substrate-Mediated Gene Delivery, Amy Mantz

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Nonviral gene delivery modifies gene expression by transferring exogenous genetic material into cells and tissues, typically through a bolus of complexes formed by electrostatic interactions between cationic lipid or polymer vectors with negatively charged nucleic acids (e.g. DNA). Although nonviral gene delivery is safer, more cost-effective, and more flexible compared to viral systems, nonviral transfection suffers from low efficiency due to extracellular and intracellular barriers. Much research has focused on tuning physiochemical properties of the complexing vectors to improve transfection, yet the cell-material interface may prove a better platform to immobilize DNA complexes for substrate-mediated delivery (SMD) and modulate the …

Uumanned Aerial Vehicle Data Analysis For High-Throughput Plant Phenotyping, Jiating Li

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The continuing population is placing unprecedented demands on worldwide crop yield production and quality. Improving genomic selection for breeding process is one essential aspect for solving this dilemma. Benefitted from the advances in high-throughput genotyping, researchers already gained better understanding of genetic traits. However, given the comparatively lower efficiency in current phenotyping technique, the significance of phenotypic traits has still not fully exploited in genomic selection. Therefore, improving HTPP efficiency has become an urgent task for researchers. As one of the platforms utilized for collecting HTPP data, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) allows high quality data to be collected within short …

Predictive Modeling Of Fate And Transport Of Three Prevalent Contaminants In Midwest Agroecosystem Surface Waters: Nitrate-N, Atrazine, And Escherichia Coli, Samuel Hansen

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The majority of streams and rivers in the United States (U.S.) are ecologically impaired, or threatened by anthropogenic stressors. Recent reports have found atrazine in drinking water to be associated with increased birth defects and incidences of Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, with higher levels of significance from exposure to both atrazine and nitrate-N. In contrast, recent illnesses from E. coli contaminating vegetables that originated from irrigation water has increased awareness of identifying sources of E. coli entering irrigation reservoirs.

Methods to accurately predict atrazine and E. coli occurrence and potential sources in waterways continue to limit the identifying appropriate and effective prevention …

Field Obstacle Identification For Autonomous Tractor Applications, Caleb Lindhorst

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

New technologies are being developed to meet the growing demand for agricultural products. Autonomous tractors are one of the many solutions to address this demand. Obstacle detection and avoidance is an important consideration for safe operation of any autonomous machine. Three field obstacles were chosen to be identified in this thesis work: tractors, round bales, and center pivots. Limited research work was found on the identification of center pivot detection.

Feasibility of using low cost LIDARs was considered for the detection of tractors, bales, and agricultural center pivots. Performance of LIDARs in different lighting conditions, different colors of obstacles, accuracy …