Emerging Agriculture is an idea which was started by the University of Saskatchewan Junior Chamber of Commerce, a new volunteer group that has students from all colleges at the U of S Campus.
And it is an idea with a Yorkton connection as Rory Nussbaumer who grew up near, and attended school in the city, has been involved from day one.
“We felt the need for a student group that wasn’t based out of just one college, and could incorporate all aspects of each specific interest across campus since in the real world, you’re not just working with just engineers or just accountants; you’re working with people from all different backgrounds,” Nussbaumer told Yorkton This Week. “The goal of every event that’s put on by the Junior Chamber of Commerce helps connect students from each college, and the Emerging Agriculture event does just that.
“Along with collaboration between the Saskatchewan Chamber of Commerce, we noticed a large gap in the lack of ways to connect students from commerce, engineering, computer science, and agriculture degrees.
“The event we brought to life, Emerging Agriculture, helps connect those students to compliment one another’s interests and build upon ideas based on each other’s certain expertise.
“The goal is to create connections between these individuals that may never have happened before to build the start-up companies, that may become the large companies of tomorrow that build and diversify Saskatchewan’s economy.”
Nussbaumer said his own background and interests drew him to become personally involved.
“While I was going to school completing my Commerce Undergraduate at the U of S, I was renting land and working on my family farm just east of Yorkton which gave me a full understanding of the agronomy side of farming,” he said.
“In the second last year of my undergraduate, I received the opportunity to do an eight-month internship as a merchandiser buying canola for a crushing plant in Lloydminster, which then gave me the opportunity to become a Commodity Trader Intern at their trading office in Winnipeg over the past summer. These internships forced me to leave the family farm because of the distances, but they also allowed me to get a full understanding of where our local production ends up that many producers don’t realize.
“When you have that full understanding of how the grain you’ve grown goes from your field to the table, you have a lot more passion for the industry itself and it’s made me want to continue in the commodity industry. While talking to a friend who was a part of the Junior Chamber of Commerce, he proposed that I take on this year’s event into its second year. As the first year is always the year you learn from your mistakes, this was the first year we actually believe some of the solutions that came out of the event can make their way to market.”
The actual Emerging Agriculture event is an affair focused on taking specific ideas, and building upon them as a group.
“The basic layout of the event is to have individuals pitch their ideas at the beginning of the first day, organically formulate into groups, work on their ideas together and be mentored by industry professionals ranging from farmers to patent lawyers, and then present their solution to the panel of judges,” explained Nussbaumer.
“This year’s event focused more on the value added side of agriculture.
“We realize that drones scouting crops and auto-steer in tractors are the latest hype around agriculture, but we wanted to ensure that this year’s participants dug deep into not just the ‘hype’ of agriculture’s latest trends but also going down to the basics and solving problems that may already be semi-solved, but may have better ways of being solved.”
And there is something viable at the end of the process for those with the ideas.
“To create more in depth ideas, we increased the amount of prizes to be won,” said Nussbaumer.
This year’s event offered consulting opportunities from KPMG, Vendasta Technologies, and Square One, Cash Prizes from Sasktel, as well as Marketing, Engineering, and Computer Science internship opportunities through Refresh, Vendasta Technologies, SeedHawk, and IBM.
The event also looks to make people think ‘bigger’.
“To inspire this year’s participants we brought in a Futurist by the name of Nikolas Badminton that blew the minds of participants about where the future of agriculture technology is heading,” said Nussbaumer.
A panel discussion was also held where participants talked about the value added sector of agriculture; The participants included; Dr. Tim Sharbel - Head of the Global Institute of Food Security, Brennan Turner - CEO of Farmlead.com, Dr. Stuart Smyth - Professor at the U of S College of Agriculture, and Edward Lambert - VP of Research and Development with SeedHawk. The panel was moderated by Bert Sutherland, Committee Chair of the Greater Saskatoon Chamber of Commerce Agribusiness Committee.
In more specific terms the EA program utilizes what is termed a hackathon approach to the process of expanding upon a basic idea.
“A hackathon is an event that brings groups of students together to work out or ‘hack’ ideas into solutions over a set amount of time,” explained Nussbaumer. “It’s very popular in Silicon Valley where groups of individuals will try and solve existing problems for prizes.
“As our goal was to connect students in different colleges, which doesn’t usually happen, this model was perfect in allowing individuals to pitch their ideas at the beginning of the event, organically formulate groups based on their favourite idea, and create teams to compete against others.”
The process is rather freeform.
“We actually don’t just focus on one or two ideas to solve during our hackathon,” offered Nussbaumer. “We allow anyone from a farmer, to a consumer to put their ideas on our online ‘idea wall’ at EmergingAgriculture.Tournyo.com and then those ideas are pitched at the beginning of the event.
“Participants form groups based on those ideas and judges critique those ideas based on the potential for them to become success in the real market.”
This year the EA event attracted about 75 participants and spectators over each of the three days.
“When I heard about Emerging Agriculture through the Computer Science department at the U of S, I was interested in participating as a way to take the skills that I had and applying them to one of the most important industries, agriculture,” said participant Corey Hickson, a Computer Science student from Saskatoon. “I saw it as a great opportunity to practice collaborating with a variety of different disciplines and finding ways in which our different skill sets worked together.”
Ian Paulson a M.Sc. Candidate - Mechanical Engineering at the U of S, said the program was one he found fit his own background.
“Having come from a farming background, there was a natural draw to see what sorts of challenges could be addressed over the weekend,” he said. “Agriculture is in the midst of some major technology-driven changes, so I knew that getting a bit closer look at what’s happening in the industry would make for an interesting weekend.”
When asked if the process was a good one” Paulson replied; “Absolutely. Given the diverse background of participants, allowing groups to form organically along with opportunities for input from mentors, farmers, and business community members resulted in a creative problem-solving atmosphere …
“It’s always a beneficial experience when people from different backgrounds (agriculture, business, engineering, computer science, students, non-students) can bounce ideas and solutions off each other. Every exchange is a learning opportunity for those involved, and in the end there were some great solutions proposed.”
Seven teams of a maximum six people formulated to work on ideas ranging from turning basic agriculture manuals from the government into interactive websites for farmers, to sensors that can count canola green seeds before entering a crop from your combine instead of having to check manually.
Inside of the hackathon while groups worked on these ideas over the three days, there was also an hour long Sasktel Mini Case Challenge that utilized Sasktel’s M2M technology to work on ways to incorporate sim card’s and Sasktel’s cloud service to better service the livestock industry.
“Winning solutions that came out of the mini case challenge included a harness for cattle that allowed for exact prediction of gestation times, as well as more efficient ways to track and monitor livestock,” said Nussbaumer. “This year’s hackathon was a huge leap from the year before, and we believe through the response of this year’s event that we may potentially see some of this groups turn into start-ups and licence their solutions to larger companies.”
The final winning solution focused on ‘Real-time Green Seed Detection’ an idea put forward by the team of Luke McCreary, Charley Sprenger, Ian Paulson, Erik Tetland, and Gavin Whitmore.
The goal was a solution to finding green canola seed counts right on the combine, without having to stop the machine, without spilling seeds out of the paddle, without guessing about how many samples to take. This proposed green seed detection device still looks at the amount of green seed in a crushed sample, but by using innovative light detection methods the manual testing procedure has been automated. Now, sampling is performed right on the clean grain elevator of the combine with this retrofit solution. Take seed samples on demand, or continuously sample in the background and display results on the fly in the cab, said Nussbaumer.
The overall process was a good one, said Hickson.
“Being my first hackathon, I wasn’t sure what I expected going in,” he said. I knew I’d be spending the weekend practicing skills and figuring out how to use those skills to solve problems I had just learned about. The hackathon definitely gave me the chance to do that, but there was also a lot more and for that reason Emerging Agriculture really impressed me and I was surprised at how much effort was put into making the event as a whole as rewarding as it was.
“The hackathon was setup in a way that promoted groups finding ways to work together and really made it possible for teams to realize solutions and prototypes to the problems we were tackling. For example, having a panel of professionals which mentored groups on potential weaknesses that they may not have considered yet was a valuable asset.
“Overall I really enjoyed the hackathon. This was the first hackathon I’ve actually attended, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but it was a great experience and very much worth it. I’d recommend that students of all disciplines (especially those with technical skills) to come out to events like Emerging Agriculture.
“At the very least you’ll have gained a lot of valuable knowledge about another industry, for example agriculture. At best? Anything really, you could create a real, innovative solution to a very real problem that people are faced with.”
Nussbaumer said the ultimate goal of EA is to formulate solutions which can be developed to deal with specific situations in farming.
“Our goal every year is to ensure that the agriculture tech companies that we need in the industry tomorrow, are built in Saskatchewan today,” he said. “We also have high ambitions to turn Emerging Agriculture into not only a three-day event, but a year-long initiative that can help further the groups through basic funding.”
Nussbaumer said this year’s event has encouraged organizers about the future of EA.
“Because of this year’s success, our goal is to make next year’s event larger than ever before,” he said. “We think having the event during Crop Week and near Crop Production Show allows us to gain more exposure to Saskatchewan’s Agriculture Industry so we will continue to have the event in January.
“We are always looking for farmers and industry professionals interested in coming to mentor the groups while they work on their projects over the three days of the event.”
If there is any interest on that and any other details of the hackathon they can email [email protected]
