Is the Agriculture sector due for a technological disruption?
Recently I participated as a mentor for the first Agriculture-focused hackathon in Bulgaria. There were 10 teams working on ideas related to:
- AI in Agriculture
- IoT in Agriculture
- Analysis of farming machine data
- Beekeepers tech
Contrary to the organization’s team expectations, there were hardly any farmers present and the majority of people were developers. Of course, that’s normal for hackathons but this is the reason why the venue was literally in the middle of one of the biggest farming regions in the country, far away from big cities. Yet, this wasn’t enough to motivate farmers to come and take part in an event all about innovation in agriculture.
In the meantime, we had 10 amazing ideas from some 40 very bright and ambitious people raging from 16 to 60 years old. I was genuinely impressed with the level of development some of them achieved in such a short amount of time. In around 24 hours the teams came up with solutions to various problems, business models and quite good technical prototypes to accompany them. This makes me think — Is the agriculture sector due for some healthy dose of disruption?
Remote sensing, drone observation, smart sensors and greenhouses, data analytics and data-driven farming, computer-vision-powered diagnosis… these are only some of the possibilities. In the Netherlands, there are quite a few initiatives and even startup accelerators supporting such technologies. Yet, most of the agriculture sector in Europe is a few decades behind in technological innovation. For example, while a lot of organizations are using vertical farming in the Netherlands, most farmers in countries like Bulgaria are skeptical. This becomes even more interesting when experts say that we need to increase global food production with more than 50% in the next 30 years.
Back in university, I was taught this is the so-called “Newly vulnerable market” phenomenon or more specifically, the “Difficult to defend market”. This is observed when the market is so slow and old-fashioned, that established players cannot compete with the level of value creation a modern technological company can have. And this is exactly when industry disruption happens. We saw it with Uber and Airbnb — popular examples of how one innovative player on the market can completely change the status quo in no time. If we are lucky maybe one of the hackathon teams will be the next big innovator in the industry. ;)
Here’s a quick overview of the best ideas from the hackathon:
- The big winners of the hackathon were two brothers who came up with a concept for food tracing. The quality of the product, as well as each step of the supply chain, will be tracked and easily accessible by users via a mobile application. Looking at the other participating teams, one would assume that the brothers Alexander and Boris Brestnichky would have a hard time competing being just the two of them. Heck, the second team consisted of 7 software developers. Yet, the winning idea was the most SMART — Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely.
- The runners-up from the software company Technologica came up with an open-source solution for analyzing farming equipment and machine data. Think of a dashboard with statistics of tractor’s performance, usage, etc.
- The third place was earned by BeVine — a concept for a computer-vision-powered diagnosis of vine leaves giving a health report on the whole vineyard and the probability for various diseases.
The rest of the participants were of course also quite innovative. A special shoutout to the high-school team who worked on the idea of a web platform for farmer support and information based on sensors.
Finally, I was honored to work alongside the organization team of experts like Elke Sauter, Doriana Milenkova, Milen Vlaev, the brothers Ivo and Kaloyan Kumanov, Ziga Drev, Arie Veldhuizen, Svetlana Boyanova, prof. Bozhin Bozhinov, Deyvid Stefanov, etc. And special thanks to the jury member Svetlin Nakov who was one of the first people to teach me programming back in the day.
Anticipating the upcoming disruption of the agriculture market, I raise a glass for the winners and the successful event. Cheers!
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
