Professor Alan Hansen grew up in Zimbabwe and went to college in South Africa. When he came to the University, he dreamed of showing students what it would be like to work in agricultural engineering somewhere outside of central Illinois. In July, he got to do just that.

“I think it helped them see beyond just corn and beans,” Hansen said. “They have a different perspective of agriculture in a different country now, where there isn’t as much technology.”

Nine students participated in the four-week trip to the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, which is about a six-hour drive from Johannesburg, Hansen said. The students worked on four different projects with South African students to help improve their agricultural system.

Hansen said one of the major crops in South Africa is sugar cane, which is harvested by hand with machetes. Some of the students worked on a project to create a new, semi-mechanized machete that would increase the efficiency of the existing manual system.

“Before we went there, we had to research sugar cane. We had no idea what we were working with. We looked at the forces needed to cut the sugar cane and the methods we could use,” said Anthony McCullough, a senior in ACES who worked on the project. “The use of manual labor there is dramatically different than all the mechanized systems we use here.”

In addition to the machete, the students also worked on a new precision agriculture system similar to a riding lawn mower that could measure how much grass was being cut, as well as incorporating a global positioning system similar to those used on combines in Illinois.

“We wanted to demonstrate on a small scale what could be used in agriculture today,” said Scott Dixon, a graduate student who also went on the trip.

In addition to working on the projects, students spent their weekends on trips to the beach, the mountains or safaris. Many of those times, their South African colleagues came along.

Dixon and McCullough both said they really enjoyed hanging out with the South African students with whom they worked during their trip.

“It’s funny how the town and the country there are so different, but the kids were very similar to normal kids you would meet here,” Dixon said. “We had a lot of fun working together and just going places on the weekends.”

McCullough said he was interested in how different the college town was from Champaign.

“The clubs were only open every other night because crime was so high,” he said. “It was pretty much dead in the whole town after it got dark.”

Hansen said he thought the short length of the trip allowed more students to participate in the experience.

He said he is happy students had the chance to learn about agriculture in a different country, especially in a system that is becoming more global.

“I think this will influence some of their career choices,” Hansen said. “They will definitely be able to take away something from this trip that they can use in the future.”