Good Practice - Inspirational Idea
Agri-Hackathon
Tech for Agriculture was a data-focused hackathon held in Estonia in June 2018.
Summary
The hackathon aimed to gather fresh and innovative ideas and create new cooperation opportunities in the field of agriculture between the Netherlands and Estonia. Farmers, engineers, data scientists, and developers ’played’ with data to develop and then pitch ideas for new applications. “We built a land use monitoring tool using satellite data and Artificial Intelligence”, says Madhusudhan Srinivasa, one of the developers.
Ressources
There are many exciting things happening at the moment on the agri-tech scene. Technology is producing solutions to current challenges faced by the sector. There are biotech startups inventing new super-powered crops, hardware companies fighting against the drought, startups working on data-based solutions, and many more.
From 8-10 June 2018, the first Garage48 Tech for Agriculture hackathon took place in Tallinn (Estonia). The aim of a ‘hackathon’ is for people to work in groups intensively for a short period of time to create a new tech product or application. It is a competition, and a winner is selected at the end of the event.
The 95 participants included farmers, engineers, data scrapers, data scientists, data-visualisers, back-end developers, front-end developers, UI/UX designers, business visionaries and marketing specialists. They were from Estonia, the Netherlands, the USA, and many other countries. Upon arrival, they discovered their task: “You’ve got 48 hours to change Agriculture”.
The first day opened with an ideas pitch for new technological solutions. Participants could then choose which idea they wanted to work on and formed groups around 9 of the pitches. Databases from both Estonian (Agricultural Research Centre, Agricultural Registers and Information Board (Paying Agency), Land Board) and Dutch (the Netherlands Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality, Wageningen University) institutions were made available to participants so that they could better develop their technology towards real-life problems.
Madhusudhan Srinivasa (developer) says, “As soon as the teams were formed, we started building stuff. There were constant checkpoints during which we showed the progress to mentors and the jury. There was also training for pitching ideas. I guess this helped a lot of teams to prepare well and push in a direction of creating something that is usable and that is really working in the end.”
At the end of the last day, the groups had 3 minutes to showcase a working prototype.
Here are just a few of the solutions which were developed/improved during the event:
- Bird’s AI: monitoring land use using satellite data and artificial intelligence
- Dude! where's my tractor?: sharing farming machinery between farmers
- BuzzUp: Shazam for bees, preventing bee colony losses by using bee buzzing to detect anomalies.
Madhusudhan worked with Bird’s AI “We built a land use monitoring tool using satellite data and Artificial Intelligence. We mapped the Tallinn area using the Estonian database and analysed herb-rich grasslands. The product has a lot of potential, for example, determining the amount of deforestation, desertification, or doing compliance checks to see if the farmer is growing what he says he is growing, thus eliminating all the manual checks that you'd have to do by visiting the field.”
“We won the hackathon and [along with 2 other winners] pitched in front of the King of the Netherlands and President of Estonia, which was really cool!” Group members are continuing to work together to improve the tool further.
The hackathon was organised by Garage48, the Netherlands Embassy in Estonia, the Estonian Ministry of Rural Affairs and Estonian University of Life Sciences, the Netherlands Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality, and the Estonian Chamber of Agriculture and Commerce.