Farming and agriculture are under constant development, and modern digital technologies and IT solutions are becoming increasingly important for the efficiency of the industry as well as its climate and environmental footprint.

Claus Grøn Sørensen is a professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Aarhus University, and he has dedicated his life to research into digital and other innovative technologies for agriculture. He has just been appointed as the president of the International Commission of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering (CIGR), which is the world's largest non-profit organisation within agricultural engineering. At the organisation's congress in Japan in December, he was also awarded a High Merit Award for his research.

"There’s no denying that data and digital technologies increasingly form the basis for how we can optimise and streamline one of the world's oldest industries, agriculture, and do so in a way that takes into account the environment, biodiversity and the climate crisis. There’s already been huge developments in intelligent systems, but we’re still just scratching the surface of the profound digitalisation and not least the possibilities of digitisation to rethink processes in agriculture that will come over the next couple of decades," he says.

Since the early 1990s, Claus Grøn Sørensen has been working on analysing and optimising production systems in the agricultural sector and its supply chains. Over the past decade in particular, he has conducted research into a strong interconnection between information technology and intelligent, optimised operations in an ever more digital agriculture.

He qualified as an agronomist specialising in engineering and economics from the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University of Copenhagen. At the start of the 1990s he found a job at the Danish State Agricultural Engineering Experiment (later the Danish Institute of Agricultural Sciences, Dept. of Agricultural Engineering) at the Bygholm research centre, and he took a PhD at the Technical University of Denmark a few years later. He has been a professor at Aarhus University since 2020.

With regard to his appointment as the president of CIGR and his High Merit Award he says:

"It's a great honour for me to receive the award and the title of upcoming president of the organisation. Raising awareness and promoting the use of digital and other intelligent technologies for agriculture and farming is important work, and I look forward to establishing even greater networks and relationships within the area in the future. Even though we’re developing many new intelligent systems, there are still far too few farms actually using them, and I hope that, as president of CIGR, I can help push things in a positive direction to benefit both the sector and nature," he says.

CIGR was established in 1930 in Liége, Belgium as an international, independent, non-profit organisation for agriculture, and its mission is to simulate the development of science and technology within the field of agriculture and agricultural engineering. The organisation is the largest of its kind in the world.

Contact

Professor Claus Grøn Sørensen
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Mail: claus.soerensen@ece.au.dk
Tel.: +45 22827547