Description
The Farm Technology Group has, together with partners within Wageningen UR, a strong history and background in design of innovative production systems for various agricultural products, from the regular animal and plant related products to mushrooms, insects and algae. Design or redesign of agricultural production systems and chains is needed to deal with trade-offs between sustainability goals, e.g. economic versus environmental goals. Besides, structured design methods, their interactive and interdisciplinary implementation are crucial for the invention, conceptualization and adoption in practice of break-through innovative system designs. The development and application of the Reflexive Interactive Design (RIO) method resulted in novel design concepts like Rondeel, Lankerenhof, Kwatrijn, and Windstreek, that were all built in practice by partners involved.
As a post-doc, you will further adapt and develop the RIO design method in strong interaction with the application of the method to new cases. The scientific methodological challenge is to deal with soft requirements of stakeholders, limited reproducibility of some design steps, to include the abilities and behaviour of animals in the design process, and design of novel complex cropping systems.
Your focus will be on the technical and engineering aspects of the design method and the application to production systems, and the integration of knowledge from social, biological and environmental disciplines. Design challenges for the coming years are expected to be in the field of intercropping, minimum-tillage and permaculture systems for plants, greenhouses, and production systems for animals, insects and algae. These design challenges result from the need and ambition to achieve environmental, resource, biodiversity, social and economic goals at the same time.
You will realize these objectives by providing input to various current research projects at the Farm Technology group. Bachelor and Master students Biosystems Engineering as well as PhD's will be supervised by you during their thesis project. You will support and ideally lead the acquisition of new (PhD) projects in collaboration with other university groups, industry and colleagues of the contract research institutes within Wageningen UR. Project results will be disseminated through papers in peer reviewed journals and conference proceedings. Finally, you will contribute to the yearly BSc course Engineering Design and MSc course Biosystems Design. Within the Farm Technology group and within Wageningen UR you will closely cooperate with other colleagues working in the field of animal husbandry and precision livestock farming, plant production systems and precision agriculture, sensors and agricultural robotics, innovation science and environmental sciences.
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