The Christchurch company’s Agriculture Hackathon over a week of afternoons resulted in three teams of six people drawing up software code for problems confronting farmers.
Knights of the Round Stable were the winners after their Big Brooder software impressed the judges.
Extra marks went to them for running a live demonstration of their software using ping-pong balls instead of baby chicks.
Brooding temperature is important in a chick’s first 14 days, with even small mistakes taking a toll on growth, mortality, organ development and feathering.
The team’s software monitors their comfort levels by tracking their clustering behaviour.
Unlike other apps mainly acting as a monitor, it also automatically makes micro-adjustments, more precise than human involvement as opening doors causes more temperature changes.
The software can run locally on a farmer’s hardware with no permanent cloud connection.
Innovation engineer Chiron Evans said the team struggled at first to figure out a hackathon idea.
The team leader said more abstract options were considered, but people could see the Big Brooder app working rather than imaging the product.
"The biggest challenge was coming up with the idea, the second-biggest was integrating it all at the end because we wanted to have an actual demo. Part of the draw of the idea we chose was having a practical element with the live demo."
Jade teams were spared from usual duties for about a week of afternoons to come up with a winning idea, code and prepare for a 10-minute presentation followed by audience questions on March 11.
Knights of the Round Stable was selected overall winner by judges with each member receiving $250 and a trophy.
People’s Choice winner decided by an app with prizemoney of $100 each was the Farmhouse team for their same-named software.
They designed a mobile-first app, bringing farm data together to prevent farmer burnout and support farming decisions from anywhere.
A dashboard brings together pasture, livestock and equipment data, live tracking maps and real-time weather alerts with action recommendations.
"This is the fifth hackathon I’ve been part of, at Jade and elsewhere, and this was absolutely the best group I’ve been part of, and the best set of presentations I’ve ever seen," team leader Luke Woollett, Jade innovation engineer, said.
The Cow-Operative team came up with Legalease software to reduce the administration burden for farmers dealing with more regulations.
An intuitive central platform is linked to up-to-date regulatory information, giving farmers a one-stop shop for their data and reporting. Paperwork auto population, mapping and AI integration are among features to act as a one-stop-shop for compliance.
Systems software engineer Michelle Hsieh said they relied on external research to find out what farmers needed as the team had no background in agriculture.
Four people in the team were were graduate engineers and they relied on new technology and learning on the job for the programming and coding, she said.
"The most fun part was being able to see it come together and seeing people really learning and getting outside their comfort zones."
The judging panel included Jade chief executive Justin Mercer, Skipton Group chairwoman Gwyn Burr, Fonterra operations principal architect Rob Lorimer, Madcap technical director Jeremy Ridley and Dairy NZ General Manager strategy and commercial partnerships manager Dave Maslen.
Mr Maslen said the creativity of teams and depth of understanding of the agriculture sector and its challenges to identify potential solutions was inspiring.
"I think it’s really easy in the New Zealand ag sector to identify problems, it’s a lot harder to identify solutions to them and for me that’s where the magic happens."
Previous hackathon ideas have been added to modules in Jade’s business platform.
