The latest in the series of successful Agricultural Engineering Conferences

Over 500 delegates from 41 different countries enjoyed an interesting, productive and exciting conference in the sunny location of Crete, Greece. In total, 624 scientific papers were presented (425 oral and 199 posters) in 87 sessions. There were wide ranging presentations on 50 different topics. The topics were as diverse as classic tractor and equipment development and performance, to more recent aspects of agricultural and biosystems engineering such as the use of acoustic sensors to determine the location of a pig with an infectious cough or techniques to look at the resistance of trees in urban streets to the pollutants from traffic exhaust.

The Conference was organised by the Hellenic Society of Agricultural Engineers and the European Society of Agricultural Engineers, EurAgEng, and ran from 23-25 June. The highlight of the Conference was the Gala Dinner held on Tuesday evening in a stunning spot around a large pool where EurAgEng was able to honour its prize winners for 2008.

The prestigious Award of Merit went to Dipl Ing Michael Teich, recently retired from John Deere Works Mannheim, Germany, for his life’s work on tractor development. Once again this Award has been given to an engineer who is incredibly enthusiastic about his work and an inspiration to all agricultural engineers.

The winners of the Innovation and Development Award, for a presentation on an innovative development which must include commercial partners, were Prof J Hahn, Dr H Risius and H Korte of the Humboldt-University of Berlin and the Claas company of Germany, with their paper on Segregating Different Qualities of Grain During Harvesting.

Daniel Berckmans, on behalf of his team from Leuven University, Belgium, collected an Outstanding Paper Award from the editors of the EurAgEng Official Scientific Journal, Biosystems Engineering. Along with his colleagues the paper by V.T. Thanh, A. Van Brecht, E. Vranken and D. Berckmans entitled Modelling of Three-dimensional Air Temperature Distributions in Porous Media was one of four that won Outstanding Paper Awards.

Prof Zoltán Láng of Hungary, Dr Ludger Frerichs of Germany, Prof Josse De Baerdemaeker of Belgium and Prof Bill Day of the UK were all honoured with the Society’s Recognition Award for their efforts in leading and promoting the Society.

Sincere thanks from EurAgEng members and others attending the conference go to the Hellenic Society Agricultural Engineers Council, who have worked together for the last two years to organise the AgEng2008 Conference under the presidency of Prof George Papadakis. Thanks also go to John Alexakis and his team from Vougas Associates for arranging a superb time.

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