Search for solutions to agricultural problems in Uruguay. That was the objective of the first edition of HackathonAGRO that took place at Expo Prado on September 17 and 18, organized by the British Embassy, the Rural Association of Uruguay ARU and the Uruguayan Chamber of Information Technology, CUTI.
The idea of the activity was to promote collaboration, innovation and entrepreneurship and to find solutions to specific problems faced by the agricultural sector through the use of technology. Each of the 14 teams was made up of three professionals with experience in agriculture, information technology or business. Some of them knew each other and others did not.
The teams were presented with five challenges and each one chose one to solve. From Saturday at 10 a.m. until Sunday at 5 p.m. they worked on the creation of their project; a concrete product together with a business plan that can be applied as a solution to the chosen problem.
Some of the challenges were aimed at improving livestock and agricultural production and others at protecting agricultural production.
The winning team, made up of Lucía San Román, Martín Alurralde and Sergio Gorrochategui, focused on the problem of cattle rustling.
His project, VIGIATOR, promotes an interesting security mechanism for livestock production. VIGIATOR is a powerful monitoring and control system that uses SMS messages to alert the producer about a situation of theft or risk and directly addresses the problem of cattle theft in Uruguay today; in 2015 a sheep was stolen every three hours and the trend continues to increase.
This solution uses an accelerometer that reports possible abnormal behaviour in the herds, whether due to theft or attack by predators such as foxes and wild boars.
When presenting their project in HackathonAGRO, the team showed the functionality of this application live and direct by placing a cell phone on the neck of a sheep, like a "pig".
In this way, they could access all their movements from the App open on the owner's cell phone monitoring online: the location of the sheep in question, an icon to alert the police (which generates a phone call to the corresponding section), listen to the ambient noise where the sheep is, share the notice with the network of nearby producers to be alert and if necessary access the electronic complaint with the location and name of the complainant already loaded to facilitate this process.
The team will continue to advance in this project to reach soon with VIGIATOR to the entire livestock sector.
Sergio Gorrochategui and Martín Alurralde have been partners for years and run the company Jalumar dedicated to the development of Android applications based in AguadaPark, while Lucía San Román is a student at the Faculty of Agronomy, UDELAR.
The three received round-trip airfare to the United Kingdom, five nights' accommodation and participation in an Agri-Tech conference entitled "Innovation for an Agricultural Revolution" to be held in November in Cambridge. They will also attend a conference on agricultural drones at Harper Adams University.
The second place team will receive 12 team coaching sessions plus an executive coaching session with each member, by Human Capital Consulting, and an online English course for professionals, by the British Council. In addition, the da Vinci Foundation through its incubator da Vinci labs will accompany the second prize winning team of HackathonAGRO 2016 in validating and strengthening their teams and businesses with a total of 15 hours of business consulting.
Third place was also awarded an online English course from the British Council and 10 hours of business consultancy from the da Vinci labs incubator.
The jury, made up of one member from each of the organising institutions, announced its decision on Sunday at 7pm. Katharine Felton, for the British Embassy, José Bonica for ARU and Álvaro Lamé, representing CUTI.
The jury's verdict recognized the winner for "the strength of the simplicity of the business model, without neglecting the degree of added value and the effective response to the problem and the challenge posed." It also highlighted "the integration of a client and an end user" and "the creation of a functional prototype".
HackathonAGRO was supported by IBM, University of Montevideo and AGESIC and many other companies and institutions. 14 mentors from these institutions were present during the 36 hours of the activity to guide the teams as they developed their proposals.
Ebizmarts, CAF, Ingenio, Software Testing Bureau, ICA also supported the activity.
Other companies that participated in this initiative were: British Council, HCC, Harper Adams, da Vinci labs, MGAP, INIA and Pedidos ya, which provided the food during the event.
Source: British Embassy in Montevideo
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