Two Departments of ASU to Train Unique Specialists

As part of the FARMER project, Astrakhan State University is developing a master program in Agromechatronics. In late May and early June 2018, a coordination meeting between the participating universities and a seminar took place at the Slovak University of Agriculture in Nitra. People of ASU and their colleagues from a number of countries learnt about the hands-on aspects of education in agricultural engineering.

The FARMER project was initiated as part of the Erasmus+ program. One of its main goals is to contribute to modernization and internationalization of higher education in Russia and Iran. An urgent sphere of cooperation is agriculture. ASU already carried out joint projects with non-Russian universities in this sphere before. Now new ways of network interaction and specialty development have been identified; the new specialty aims to develop the agricultural industry at the international level.

Agromechatronics was not taught in Russia before, so experience of ASU will be new for our country. In addition, unlike other project participants, ASU unites two Departments to deliver this master program. Engineers and specialists in Robotics will work together with agronomists to train highly qualified professionals.

The FARMER project suggests creating a consortium of universities. The Russian participants are Astrakhan State University, Platov South-Russian State Polytechnic University, Stavropol State Agrarian University, Volgograd State Technical University, and South Ural State University. Iran is represented by two universities – the Sari University of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources and the Babol Noshirvani University of Technology. Our EU partners are the Ilmenau University of Technology (Germany), the University of L’Aquila (Italy), and the Slovak University of Agriculture in Nitra, which hosted the seminar. Astrakhan Region has been a close partner of the Republic of Slovakia for a long time. For example, Astrakhan delegations regularly come to the Agrokomplex Exhibition in Nitra.

This time our Slovak partners suggested an informative educational program to their guests. The project participants have learnt about engineering mechanics, technologies of modernization in animal breeding, management of agricultural ecosystems, etc. Besides the seminar, they were shown Slovak enterprises, watched the labs of the Slovak University of Agriculture, and visited to the AgroBioTech Research Centre.