Agricultural Engineering Has Roots in Family Farming Email This BlogThis! Share to Twitter Share to Facebook
Candice Engler, a senior product engineer for Deere & Company and a student in MIT’s SDM program, discovered her affinity for engineering while growing up on a 2,800-acre farm in Ankeny, Iowa. Each morning, her father maneuvered a tractor through rows of corn and soybeans. One day, he asked her to help him construct a sprayer that would apply pesticides to the crops to control weeds and insects.
Some 12-year-olds might have responded by scratching their heads, but Engler picked up a tape measure and jumped right in. Working with her father inside the family’s barn, she then cut and welded steel tubes and calculated the angles to mount the hydraulic cylinders. After a month of labor, she and her father attached a working, three-point sprayer to the tractor’s hitch.
“The sprayer we designed is an example of a complex system,” Engler said. “It included a mechanical support structure to keep everything in place, a solution system to store and distribute the chemicals and a hydraulic system to fold the sprayer for road transportation.”
Candice and Ben Engler with their wedding party in front of a
field of soybeans.
Photo credit: Katie McDonald Photography
Engler believes that “every good farmer is a good tinkerer” and to augment her interest in “tinkering” — applying math and science concepts to improve agricultural systems — Engler studied biosystems engineering at Oklahoma State University. While in the classroom, she learned new ways of mechanizing agricultural processes and thought about how she could apply them to her own farm. “Knowledge often travels in both directions between the fields of farming and engineering,” Engler said.
After graduating with a BS in 2004, Engler soon went to work for Deere & Company as a manufacturing engineer. She started by streamlining the production of grain drills, which were stamped, assembled, painted, and shipped by four separate departments. Rising quickly within the company, Engler soon turned her focus to software and systems architecture. As her responsibilities changed, so did her perspective.