Douglas Prairie

Instructor
South Dakota State University

Douglas Prairie has been an instructor with the Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering department at South Dakota State University since August of 2016. Douglas is heavily involved in developing and maintaining curriculum to meet the ever-increasing demands of today’s precision agriculture professionals. The SDSU curriculum could be something as basic as proper equipment operation or as complex as systems engineering and failure diagnostics. Prior to SDSU Douglas was employed within industry for close to 20 years in roles ranging from design engineering to product and sales management. Courses lead by Douglas include: Senior Design for Ag and Biosystems Engineering, Ag Power and Machinery, Monitoring and Control of Ag Systems, Farm Machinery Management along with Hydraulic and Fluid Power Systems.

Founded in 1881, South Dakota State University is South Dakota’s Morrill Act land-grant university and is the largest higher-education institution in the state, with a 2016 fall enrollment of 12,613 students from 49 states and 85 countries. The Agricultural & Biosystems Engineering Department offers degrees in Agricultural & Biosystems Engineering (ABE), which prepares students to work with the development and design of systems that impact food sources, and in Ag Systems Technology (AST), which teaches students the practical application of new innovations in the agricultural market. We have also partnered with the Department of Agronomy, Horticulture, and Plant Science and the Department of Mathematics and Statistics to jointly offer the nation’s first Precision Agriculture (PRAG) major.