Growing up in Lamont, Oklahoma, Floyd Dowell was a farm boy who liked the mechanical part of farming, including tractors and implements. After high school, he went to Oklahoma State University for a B.S. degree in agricultural engineering. Then, he recalls, “I thought I might go back and farm, but that was when the farm economy was tanking. The economy in Oklahoma was really bad, so there was hardly any opportunity to make it in farming.”

At that point, Dowell made a pivotal decision to stay in school and pursue his master’s degree in agricultural engineering at Oklahoma State. “I enjoyed the research part of things,” he explains. And why stop there? He would go on to get his PhD. in the same field from the University of Illinois. This would take him down a unique path that kept his hand in farming but at an academic, scientific level working for the federal government.

Fresh out of school, Dowell’s first job took him to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Peanut Research Lab, Dawson, Georgia. As a lead scientist, he was responsible for automating a peanut inspection system. In 1995, he went to the USDA’s Grain Marketing and Production Research Center (GMPRC) in Manhattan, Kansas.

Now 47, Powell works as a research leader in the Engineering Research Unit at GMPRC, leading a research group responsible for developing technology to measure and maintain grain quality. This involves developing instruments and procedures to measure the characteristics of wheat and similar materials using techniques such as near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS).

GMPRC’s mission is to conduct research and develop new technologies for the production, harvesting, storage, marketing, and use of grain. It consists of the Biological Research Unit, Engineering Research Unit, Grain Quality & Structure Research Unit, Plant Science & Entomology Research Unit, and Wind Erosion Research Unit. GMPRC numbers about 80 employees, including 35 Ph.D. scientists like Dowell. Others have degrees in things like entomology, biology, or chemistry.

The center lies near Kansas State University and enjoys a relationship with KSU in which many undergraduate and graduate students work at GMPRC. As an adjunct professor, Dowell advises undergrads and graduate students.

His farming roots notwithstanding, what does Dowell like about agricultural engineering? “The biological part of things versus the other kinds of engineering like mechanical or electrical,” he replies. “Because it’s so unpredictable and complex to understand how the environment, the weather, and plant growing conditions, and everything else affects a plant and then trying to solve problems related to that. To me, it’s a fascinating area to work in. It’s not like dealing with ball bearings all day long or designing a piece of equipment that’s going to put a door on a car all day long. This is completely different engineering.”

When Dowell came to GMPRC 12 years ago, it had a reputation for working in single kernel analysis. “You could look at distributions of quality within a sample versus the bulk quality,” as Dowell explains. That’s when he started working with near infrared spectroscopy. You can use it to measure the characteristics of any biological material, including protein, moisture, water, starch, or animal pectin content. The technology had been around for many years for measuring large samples. He worked with a collaborator who had been doing single kernel analysis with NIRS.

Dowell explains how the rapid, non-destructive process works: “We hit it with near infrared radiation, and the amount of energy absorbed by a wheat kernel, or anything else, is a function of what makes up that wheat kernel. So the more protein in that kernel the more energy is absorbed at specific wavelengths, or the more water, the more energy is absorbed at other wavelengths. So looking at that entire spectrum, you can calculate the composition of that wheat kernel. And then we can sort that kernel if we want to sort a sample based on, say, protein content.”

“My contribution was to automate that process,” he continues. “It requires developing a system to pick up one kernel at a time and delivering it to a viewing area. Sometimes we use vacuum pickups, but we have also used vibratory trays. Kernels are sorted using air jets or solenoid driven gates. It also involves lots of programming to get everything to work together and with proper timing. The whole project involves agricultural, electrical, and mechanical engineers, machinists, and programmers. Once we got it automated, it quickly grew to a lot of different research areas.”

As a result of Dowell’s work, an automated single-kernel NIRS system has been commercially marketed for use by the grain industry to automatically measure quality attributes of grain. “We do a lot of work with breeders to select seeds with specific traits,” he says. Besides wheat, they also use NIRS on corn, sorghum, barley, rice, and soybeans.

“Our NIR work has really taken off since 2000, and we’ve been pretty busy. Right now, we’re doing a lot of work with the scab community,” Dowell remarks. Scab is a wheat fungus disease found in the northern United States. “We’re working with several breeders to help them select, we hope, resistant kernels, so they can develop scab-resistant lines.”

As an extension of GMPRC’s grain research, Dowell says he finds himself doing a lot of spectroscopy work with insects. “That’s going in a whole different direction with a life of its own. We do the same concept of a single kernel, but we’re looking at single insects. For example, a mosquito is roughly the same size as a wheat kernel. We can collect a spectrum from it just like we can a wheat kernel. Once we have the spectrum of a mosquito, we can tell you things like its species, sex, or age.”

Dowell is working with the International Atomic Energy Agency in using this technology to determine species of mosquitoes that carry malaria. He has visited Tanzania to field test the system to help in their malaria control programs.

Another area GMPRC has worked with is fly pupa, the pupal stage of a fly, a little hard casing about the size of a wheat kernel. “We can sort out all the males and irradiate those to sterilize them,” Dowell reports. They’re working on eradicating the tze tze fly in Africa. They’ve determined the age of midges, a small biting insect that transmits sheep and cattle diseases. And they determine the fertility of honeybees as part of colony collapse disorder studies.

Dowell marvels, “It continues to expand. It seems like every other week I get a call from someone else wanting to try something. It’s been a fascinating project.” As he notes, “It has required a lot of cooperation between different disciplines as well as different agencies. I work a lot with the Center for Disease Control as well international agencies. So it’s been really fun from that aspect to have to learn something new as well as coordinate with all these other people to solve a much bigger problem than anyone of us independently could solve.”

Despite the progress Dowell and his charges have made in researching wheat and other grains, GMPRC suffers the usual vagaries of government agencies. For example, their research money has stayed constant for 10 years, not keeping up with inflation. Dowell says this results in “a lot of challenges for us out there right now.”

Progressive Engineer
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©2006 Progressive Engineer