Emerging Agriculture Hackathon Event Wrap Up
This year’s event drew over 75 people to Innovation Place over each day January 9th-11th to come spectate and participate in brainstorming and collaborating on 24 agriculture based ideas. The winning solutions that came out of this year’s hackathon can be found at http://www.emergingagriculture.com/2016-winning-solutions
The The Grand Prize presented by KPMG went to: Real-time Green Seed Detection with the team of Luke McCreary, Charley Sprenger, Ian Paulson, Erik Tetland, Gavin Whitmore. They worked on a solution to finding green canola seed counts right on the combine, without having to stop the machine, without spilling seeds out of the paddle, without guessing about how many samples to take. This proposed green seed detection device still looks at the amount of green seed in a crushed sample, but by using innovative light detection methods the manual testing procedure has been automated. Now, sampling is performed right on the clean grain elevator of the combine with this retrofit solution. Take seed samples on demand, or continuously sample in the background and display results on the fly in the cab.
All of the solutions were intensely worked on by the groups over the three days of the hackathon, scrutinized and critiqued by mentors at the event that ranged from farmers to patent lawyers and accountants, and will continue to be worked on by the groups past the event itself with the goal of potentially licensing their solutions to larger companies, or becoming a startup company out of the ideas themselves.
Also at the Emerging Agriculture weekend event, Nikolas Badminton, a Futurist from Vancouver, B.C., spoke about where the future of ag is going to go from a mostly technology standpoint:
There was a panel discussion that talked about the value added sector of agriculture between Dr. Tim Sharbel - Head of the Global Institute of Food Security, Brennan Turner - CEO of Farmlead.com, Dr. Stuart Smyth - Professor at the U of S College of Agriculture, and Edward Lambert - VP of Research and Development with SeedHawk. The panel was moderated by Bert Sutherland, Committee Chair of the Greater Saskatoon Chamber of Commerce Agribusiness Committee. Visit the website www.emergingagriculture.com to find out more about the event and watch for news on next year's hackathon.
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