Open Farming Hackdays 2020

From 4 to 5 September, the first Open Farming Hackdays took place at the Liebegg agricultural centre.

Eleven new approaches

In just 36 hours, the following eleven new prototypes for the agriculture of tomorrow were created.

Die gesunde Kuh: early detection of diseases to reduce the use of medication.

Cow Value helps decide whether a cow should stay on the farm or be slaughtered.

Decision Support Besamung helps find the ideal time to inseminate a cow.

DorpAdvisor recommends the right irrigation strategy, plot by plot, to minimise water consumption and drought stress for the plants.

TRIVAtünder is an exchange platform for farmyard manure

Stop Erosion, an interactive map, shows where the risk of erosion is particularly high, so that targeted countermeasures can be taken.

Thanks to Open Source Felddaten, invasive alien plants can be detected, tagged and automatically marked on a map.

Databndlr connects consumers directly with producers.

Farmpreneur helps farmers plan for the future

EVAS automatically records the cows’ time outdoors, thus reducing the workload for farmers.

Mehr Biodiversität im Ackerbaugebiet shows how this could be achieved.

Enthusiastic & committed participants

The participants came from a wide range of backgrounds, some with no prior knowledge of agriculture: “What motivated me is that the two fields of agriculture and hacking are rather far apart, and that one can therefore benefit enormously if the two fields work more closely together. Besides, I have no idea how agriculture works,” said one of the participants.

One participant said: “Apart from the topic, I am enormously inspired by the kind of people who come together here. It is my first time at a hackathon, and being able to take part, exchange ideas and see how other people work was very exciting.”

Markus Gusset, of the Federal Office for Agriculture, took part as challenge owner for Stop Erosion. The team was able to solve 75% of the challenge, he said. On the role of open data for his challenge, he said: “That was the challenge. Not everything we needed to tackle the challenge could be solved with publicly accessible data. Even at the federal level it was difficult to integrate the data for further processing. You can’t simply process them further. There are open data that you can view and obtain, but you first need an authorisation for further processing. That was a challenge for us, because you can’t just get the authorisations quickly over a weekend.”