A potential research area under shadow in engineering:Agricultural machinery design and manufacturing

Today, as a branch of global machinery industry, the agricultural machinery design and manufacturing or agricultural engineering industry has become one of the most important industries to be supported and focussed on in the era of hunger threats foreseen in the world’s future. Increasing world populations can be considered as the key trigger on this issue. Global food/agricultural production has become vitally important as the current world population is rapidly increasing and is expected to reach 8.5 billion by 2030, 9.7 billion in 2050 and 11.2 billion in 2100. In order to produce sufficient volumes of food from current limited agricultural land, well-designed machinery and high technology-supported mechanisation of the agricultural production processes is a vital necessity. However, although novel improvements are observed in this area, they are very limited, it is seen lack of implementation of advanced engineering design and manufacturing technologies in this industry (relative to the other machinery industries) therefore agricultural engineering research area can be considered as a potential engineering research area under shadow. Most especially, this area suffers from a lack of professional leadership and management in modern machinery technology, and the ability to tackle problems in optimal design and manufacturing issues. This study aims to highlight the potentials, gaps, sector specific challenges and limitations of the agricultural engineering research area in macro level. In the study some of the key statistics related to agricultural production and agricultural machinery market in global range have been presented and focused on Turkey’s current situation as this industry and research area in Turkey shows promise because of the agricultural production potential of the country. Under consideration of the sector specific indicators, the study revealed the major result: Insufficient level of sector-specific research on implementation strategies for up-to-date design and manufacturing technologies