For a Professor of Agricultural Engineering, food security is not a slogan — it is an engineering problem. Across late 2025 and into 2026, Favtoma founder and AUST President Engr. Prof. Peter Azikiwe Onwualu has used a run of platforms with the Nigerian Institution of Agricultural Engineers (NIAE) to argue that the discipline must be reinvented around digital tools and homegrown manufacturing.
A digital revolution in the field
Delivering the keynote at the inauguration of NIAE’s new national leadership in December 2025, Onwualu called for a digital revolution in agricultural engineering to strengthen food security. He named the enabling technologies precisely — data science, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, precision mechanization, renewable energy systems, smart irrigation and modern storage — and insisted they be translated into “practical, scalable, and locally relevant applications.” Done right, he argued, digital transformation lets engineers “redesign Nigeria’s food systems for resilience, efficiency, and inclusiveness.”
The spare-parts problem
By May 2026, hosting NIAE’s Abuja Chapter at AUST, Onwualu sharpened the local-content edge of the message. “Homegrown technologies remain critical to solving problems related to food security, energy, transportation and industrial development,” he said, pressing for the operationalisation of a signed AUST-NIAE memorandum of understanding.
A central concern was strikingly practical: Nigeria’s dependence on imported machinery spare parts, which leaves agricultural machines idle and obsolete. His prescription was low-cost local manufacturing — casting, welding, machining — to keep equipment running. AUST’s own work spans irrigation, renewable energy, climate-smart agriculture, vertical farming and hydroponics, AI-driven systems, and biodigesters that convert agricultural residue into biofuels and biogas.
Collaboration between academia, industry and professional bodies is essential to tackling Nigeria’s technological and agricultural challenges.
The combination — advanced AI on one hand, a lathe making spare parts on the other — captures the Favtoma worldview neatly. Real value addition is not only the glamorous frontier; it is also the unglamorous capacity to build, maintain and own the tools that keep a food system running.