Becca Muenich joined the Biological and Agricultural Engineering Department as an associate professor. Photo by Reid Williams
Agriculture Offers Engineers Opportunities to Improve Sustainability
By John Lovett
Agriculture is a good field for an engineer looking to have an impact on environmental sustainability, said Becca Muenich, associate professor of biological and agricultural engineering.
Muenich is a Northwest Arkansas native, so she knew a little about agriculture already. But following her bachelor’s degree in biological engineering from the U of A in 2009, she completed her master’s and doctoral degrees in agricultural and biological engineering at Purdue University.
“I never thought I’d learn so much about ag,” Muenich said. “I tell my students all the time, if you want to make an impact, ag is a place to work on because it is the biggest water user and has the biggest land footprint. And I see all of that as an opportunity as an engineer to make this system we all rely on more sustainable.”
Muenich returned to Arkansas from Arizona State University, where she was an assistant professor in the School for Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment. She has more than 15 years of experience researching how environmental factors control water supplies and water quality in agricultural, urban and integrated systems.
Muenich joined the Biological and Agricultural Engineering Department in the U of A College of Engineering and the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station, the research arm of the U of A System Division of Agriculture.
“Dr. Muenich’s hire by the University of Arkansas was a rare opportunity, a coup for us, to have someone who not only has an amazing reputation in her field but also cares deeply about being in the area,” said Terry Howell, head of the Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering. “Our students are being enriched by the depth of experiences she brings to the classroom and her research. She is able to relate to our students in a unique way as an alumna of the department, and the variety of experiences outside of Arkansas allow her to bring fresh ideas to our department as well.”
Muenich is teaching the sustainable watershed engineering course for the department. She is also continuing research on projects carried over from Arizona State that are funded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Engineering with Nature program and the National Science Foundation’s Science and Technologies for Phosphorus Sustainability program.
Most of her work is stakeholder driven with specific goals to enhance the long-term sustainability of agricultural and urban systems. For example, a research project she worked on looking at water quality in 16 states showed how clustering of smaller animal feeding operations was an important predictor for water quality outcomes at a watershed scale. Their paper, titled “The spatial organization of CAFOs and its relationship to water quality in the United States,” showed that a cluster of smaller, unregulated operations has as much of an impact on the environment as the larger, regulated operations.
“This might make intuitive sense, that if you have a lot in a small amount of space, you end up overapplying manure in that space, but that’s not really how the operations are regulated or incentivized to pay for conservation,” Muenich said.
Conservation programs, she noted, are conducted voluntarily, and regulation is on an individual basis with a focus on animal numbers at a single site rather than an area within a watershed. Muenich’s research helped provide insight on “the interconnectedness within the watersheds,” she said, “which is going to be really important for the future of how we manage water quality.”
Muenich aims to collaborate on research with several U of A and Division of Agriculture faculty members and teach a graduate-level course on water quality modeling. She also intends to develop a data science class for students of any discipline interested in environmental data.
Muenich completed a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan Graham Sustainability Institute prior to her post at Arizona State. She earned her doctorate in agricultural and biological engineering from Purdue University in 2015.
She also served as a research scientist with the Sustainable Phosphorus Alliance and is an award-winning member of the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers. She was inducted into the Arkansas Academy of Agricultural and Biological Engineers in 2020 and received an Early Career Alumni Award from the U of A in 2022 after receiving the Arizona State University Faculty Women’s Association’s Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award in 2021.