Four Teams Competed with Novel Ideas

Congratulations to our four hackathon teams who dedicated their weekend to creating innovative solutions to challenges facing California growers.

Teams were formed at UC Davis on Friday evening followed by inspirational talks by Rikin Gandhi, CEO of Digital Green, Gabe Youtsey, Chief Innovation Officer at UC ANR, Karl Schiller, Co-founder and COO of Pheronym, and Ranveer Chandra, Managing Director of Research for Industry at Microsoft.

Students quickly moved into their initial pitches and received feedback on their ideas.

Saturday was a solid work day spent building out their solutions. The student teams used work spaces at the AIFS offices with access to technical support and industry mentors. They worked through their ideas, connected to APIs, trained their large language models (LLMs), and built their apps.

The Digital Green tech team stayed online live through the night from India while local mentors made themselves available in person throughout the day.

On Sunday, each team presented their solution.

FarmOps

Team Members: Earl Ranario, Heesup Yun, Jinguang Chai

In an effort to address food insecurity, FarmOps chose to focus on small farms. According to 2017 USDA census data, 1/3 of US farms contain less than 9 acres.

FarmOps' goal is to deploy technology accessible by small farm owners to aid their current practices.

The FarmOps app provides:

• access to advice aided by historical data using UC Davis Cost Studies,
• systematic analysis of user data using FarmerChat (Digital Green) data assisted by CropManage (UC ANR),
• streamlined and visualization-based logging, and
• multi-lingual support.

SimplyCrop

Team Members: Ayush Majumdar, Anunay Akhaury, Benjamin Ross

SimplyCrop is a generative dashboard designed specifically for farmers, providing data as precisely as CropManager and as effortlessly as Digital Green through an intuitive and powerful tool.

Farmers can use SimplyCrop data to easily optimize future planning and crop management strategies.

SimplyCrop:

• queries and receives information from CropManage based on inputs into the DigitalGreen API.
• further learns from and makes recommendations based on irrigation and fertilization documentation and published research.
• displays custom information based on data in the user's CropManage account.

StickyVision

Team Members: Erin Meader, Jonny Berlingeri, Ethan Bernstein, Krishna Aggarwal

How do farmers know when to spray pesticides? They use yellow sticky traps and manually count the harmful insects caught in the trap.

Agricultural Pest Control Advisers, or PCAs, visit the farm periodically to count the pests. The number of traps farmers can use is limited by the capacity of the PCAs to monitor them. Plus, the method is inherently inefficient and prone to error.

StickyVision provides solar-powered cameras to monitor the traps and sends the data to computers trained to identify each insect. Monitoring is more frequent, pests are counted more accurately, and data is automatically populated into a database.

StickyVision:

• empowers farmers with data to only spray pesticides when they need to, saving them money and lessening the impact of pesticides on the environment.
• provides regional pest data to identify trends and support area wide pest management practices.

CropCure

Team Members: Alise Chavanapanit, Grant Takeda, Vaun Wadhwa, Chayuth Pantrattanamongkol, Teeranade Cheng

Up to 40% of crops are lost to plant pests and diseases each year.

Current systems rely on manual monitoring and reporting, and an over-reliance on chemical controls. Existing technologies can identify plants or identify plant diseases but there is no comprehensive technological solution.

Using an image processing model and the Digital Green API, the CropCure app allows a farmer to upload an image and receive a reply back from the chatbot. With a user-friendly and accessible interface, CropCure informs the farmer if an issue is identified and can provide recommendations to address it.

CropCure provides:

• disease detection,
• comprehensive crop management, and
• centralized knowledge and forecasting.

The Final Results

Judges listened carefully to each presentation and asked many well-informed questions. Students expanded on their ideas and discussed what they would have added with more time.

The judging team included:

• Louise Ferguson, Professor of Cooperative Extension, Dept. of Plant Sciences
• Daniel Runcie, Associate Professor, Dept. of Plant Sciences
• Lucie Cahierre, Program Manager, The VINE
• Harold Schmitz, The Mars Group Founding Partner
• Courtney Ellington, Alumni Assistant Manager, Center for Land-Based Learning

And the winner is...

1st Place: CropCure

2nd Place: SimplyCrop

Runners Up (in no particular order):

FarmOps & StickyVision

We appreciate the support of everyone involved in making the Farm Advisor Hackathon a success. The students worked hard, learned about AI in agriculture, and got to meet some amazing mentors.

In addition to those named above, we'd like to recognize our mentors for the invaluable support they provided on Saturday:

• Zach Bagley, Managing Director, California Tomato Research Institute, Inc.
• Mark Bell, Vice Provost of Strategic Initiatives and Statewide Programs, UC ANR
• Sat Darshan Khalsa, Assistant Project Scientist, Dept of Plant Sciences
• Susan Ellsworth, Director, UC Cooperative Extension, Capitol Corridor
• Maryam Heidari, Postdoctoral Researcher, Institute of the Environment