BIO: Dr. Tony E. Grift is an Associate Professor in the department of Agricultural & Biological Engineering at the University of Illinois. He has a background in Industrial Automation (aka Cybernetics and Robotics), and has done extensive research in Agricultural Engineering for over two decades. He has won four outstanding paper awards and received the ASABE Presidential Citation Award in 2011 for his role as Guest Editor regarding a Resource Magazine issue titled “The Farm of the Future”. His current research comprises Robotic Thinning of Fruit, Per Plant Yield Estimation, and Machine Vision Based Rhizome cutting. Dr. Grift also heads up the Transportation Task in a program titled “Engineering Solutions for Biomass Feedstock Production” which is part of the BP funded Energy Biosciences Institute. In this task, the focus is on how to improve the transportation of biomass by optimization of the required cutting energy for size reduction, as well compression of biomass to optimize transport. Another major research focus lies in High-throughput phenotyping of corn, which is a close collaboration with corn breeder Dr. Martin Bohn from the Crop Sciences Department. This is an important area, since genotyping of crops has become an affordable high-throughput method, but the measurement of the influence of genes on the physical characteristics of plant is seriously deficient. Dr. Grift has rather controversial ideas about research in Agricultural Engineering: He claims that we are often “Picking the Low Fruit” meaning that we publish papers with ulterior motives rather than staying true to the mission of agricultural Engineering. He is also on a one-man crusade to eliminate the English Unit System from the curricula in the department of Agricultural & Biological Engineering. Feel free to peruse the “Metric Eye for the AgE Guy (and gal)” story for more on this topic.