Hackathon at Agrivision 2017: Data programmers get smart about swine

Five teams spent over 28 hours, data busting non-stop, while eating pizza and drinking coffee, in an effort to come up with tools that, ultimately, would boost efficiency in the swine sector.

The teams then pitched their concepts to the conference attendees.

Swine Smarts won the interactive vote and the programmers walked away with the €2,500 prize, and potentially, a commercial product, should they choose to go in that direction, said Simeon Nedkov, chief information officer (CIO) at FarmHack NL.

That company ran the hackathon, the goal of which was to showcase the potential of data and technology to drive innovation in livestock farming.

Nutreco, Agrisyst, ForFarmers, Hendrix Genetics, Nedap and Vion acted as ‘data donors’ for the initiative.

We caught up with Nedkov and hackathon participant, Aaron Ault, a beef cattle farmer and project lead in the Purdue University based Open Ag Data Alliance (OADA), to hear more about the benefits of data sharing for livestock production.