Mechanic technologies: new opportunities for young people

Mechanical engineers with a strong propensity for information technology and electronics: it is needed in order to design new machines, but above all to make them work in modern farms.

This is the professional figure that agricultural machinery manufacturers are looking for, according to what emerged from a survey carried out among the manufacturers and commented by President Alessandro Malavolti at the conference “Technological evolution applied to agricultural mechanization: opportunities for young people” organized by CIHEAM Bari to Agrilevante.

“Agricultural mechanization is a growing sector, in Italy as in the entire Mediterranean - the director of CIHEAM Bari Maurizio Raeli opened - and we have several projects with Mediterranean countries, such as one concerning Egypt involving 24,000 farmers through support for mechanization. The star of our activity is sustainable development, with the creation of synergies between the private sector, academia and public institutions also for mechanization”. “Today the opportunity of new educational processes by universities is growing - added Raeli - and we also offer training contributions in this direction”. Malavolti spoke about the need for new professional figures, calibrated to the needs of modern agriculture, starting from the important role of Italy as a country producing agricultural machinery.

“Italy is contending with Germany the second place in the world, after the USA, in the production of agricultural machines, but it is the first in that of machines for specialized crops, in line with its vocation for fruit and vegetables, table grapes and wine, olive, citrus.

Therefore we manufacturers have specialized in machines for these crops, without neglecting the open field ones for arable crops”. However, agricultural machinery manufacturers are not just looking for engineers and designers: “We also need technicians capable of programming machines on farms - said Malavolti - trained in the various territories to maximize the use of mechanical resources, that is, able to make the machines available for use by farmers. Our reality is precision agriculture, and the perspective is Agriculture 5.0, namely robotics applied to agriculture, in particular in the tasks that require a lot of labour, such as harvesting tomatoes, olives, grapes, fruit and vegetables. And we will also need technicians in the field to make the robots work”.