Converging new engineering and biological auspices towards sustainable agriculture

The focus on biodiversity and biotechnology is a necessity. The biological system is the most efficient energy converter and storekeeper. Engineering tools are devised to manage and harvest this stored energy. Riding on the confluence of biological and engineering auspices, the passage of agriculture evolved from wild harvest to modern production technologies, from basic necessity to abundance, from survival to security reasons. The process creates economic activities, which is the value that really matters. The development process begins from the land of plenty to the land of scarcity as the world become smaller in comparison to human activities. The bottleneck of production and the complexity of emerging problems are kept in check by the main denominator, "knowledge". The evolution of knowledge from instinct to experience, from tacit to codes and from extrapolation to artificial intelligence had been able to match these complexities . The new agriculture entails re-organization of the sector, especially the food sub-sectors, as well as the paradigm shift with respect to further improvement of agriculture as an industry and as an eco-system. Obviously the spectrum of biodiversity with respect to plantation commodity needs to be horizontally integrated to take advantage of our superior standing while our lead in mainstay plantation crops via the vertical integration needs to be further strengthened to maintain our market dominance. The right balance of combination between the two factors would be theoretically more efficient; and understanding such a system would be challenging. Mono-cropping has been the plantation stalwart, but to get more from the same piece of land by integration with other crops (plants or animals) that can give synergy is promulgated. Such integrated farming system or "poly-culture" are ideal but the key performance index and factors of production are more diverse and diff icult to manage. New knowledge is therefore required; it calls for more computational approaches to deal with the biological systems. Specialists from the traditional engineering group and the life sciences need to converge towards a more holistic aprroach, such as the bio-system engineers, who would be more apt to deal with the integrated system, while the bioprocess engineers will be more critical for "putting biology into the bottle". Training of such professionals has accelerated in recent time as indicated in the number of new schools worldwide teaching the application of engineering principles in biological systems. The credibility of this new field has yet to be fathomed. However, to be in the leading mode for tropical agriculture, training the right future professional is crucial. The future of agriculture is no more finding new land but finding new knowledge for reducing wastes and churning new innovative products to enhance productivity of the industry. T he application of new knowledge with respect to enhancing plantation industries is proposed.