This day features a follow-up event of the Rewarding Nature Hackathon held in April at the Capigi Conference, where four thought-provoking technical solutions were pitched for monitoring herbal grasslands from space (see results here). In the meantime, traction has been kept with both partners and teams evaluating how they can commit and incorporate the herbal rich grasslands monitoring into their activities or services.

We at FarmHack want to better support these teams and help take their propositions to the next level. For this reason, as a comeback day, we have mobilized companies and organizations to assist these teams with access to capital, varied assignments, technical expertise and business development advice! In this manner, we intend that the ideas once born in a hackathon are not created-and-then-forgotten but are matched accordingly with relevant expertise or clients to see them through real-life implementations!

KPN will be present as our main event sponsor and will also be providing tailored/individual advice in our afternoon strategizing sessions on the topics of smart agriculture, digital portfolio and business development. They will also have an eye open for a promising team to be included in their accelerator program as they are interested in methods for digitizing the agricultural value chains.

RVO will give us an up-to date perspective on how and what they are planning to monitor and recognize from satellite (and photo) images that might aid their routine processes at RVO.

Dr. Anton Vrieling will join us all the way from Twente University to talk about his research on vegetation phenology, spatio-temporal modelling and how drought detection or seasonal productivity can support crop/livestock insurance models. We will be also getting hands-on with him in an exercise about maize performance and drought for 2018!

Finally, we have indagated around our herbal rich grassland partners for new datasets in their possession that can be made available for the duration of this hackathon! So come explore them!