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Brief History

The Agricultural Engineering Department was originally established as one of the three Divisions under the then Agricultural Economics and Farm Management Department in the then Faculty of Agriculture now School of Agriculture. It offered courses in basic Agricultural Engineering to B.Sc. Agriculture students. It attained the status of a Department in 1996 and in 1997 it started offering a graduate programme in Soil and Water Engineering.  

With the establishment of the Faculty of Engineering Sciences in 2004, the Agricultural
Engineering Department was transferred from the College of Agriculture and Consumer Sciences to the Faculty of Engineering Sciences.  Although the Department is now under the School of Engineering Sciences, it still maintains strong links with the School of Agriculture.  The Department currently offers an undergraduate programme in Agricultural Engineering and a graduate programme in Soil and Water Engineering. The Department continues to offer basic Agricultural Engineering courses to undergraduate students in the School of Agriculture.  

The Department of Agricultural Engineering currently has three sections.  These are:

• Soil and Water Engineering
• Machine Systems Engineering
• Post-Harvest Engineering

Soil and Water Engineering which also includes irrigation engineering deals with soil and water conservation and management, climate changes, soil-plant-water relations, different types of irrigation, irrigation design and management.

Machine Systems Engineering is the area of Agricultural Engineering which deals with agricultural production machinery and agro-processing machinery design, manufacture, testing and maintenance. It also embraces engineering materials, machine-crop and machine-soil interactions.

Post-Harvest Engineering is the application of engineering principles and machinery to agricultural products and industrial raw materials after they have been harvested.  This includes crop handling and storage and crop and food processing and their accompanying machinery.