AgriNovus Seeking Teams for Innovation Challenge

The Bittner farm in Evansville. (photo courtesy: Carly Whitmore/NRCS)

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AgriNovus Indiana is looking for teams to participate in its second annual Producer-Led Innovation Challenge. This year’s competition, which comes with a $25,000 grand prize from the Purdue Foundry, challenges the tech community to make Carbon markets more accessible to farmers.

The states agbiosciences initiative says it wants to inspire innovators to create software that makes it easier for farmers to aggregate the complex data required to participate in Carbon markets. Carbon markets, AgriNovus says, provide an opportunity for companies to purchase Carbon credits generated from farm operations that sequester Carbon. 

“The data being required for farmers to qualify in carbon markets is extensive and in the case of some operations, perhaps not all efforts toward sustainability and soil health have been thoroughly recorded,” said Larry Wilkinson, director of the Indiana Soybean Alliance. “Many farmers aren’t fortunate enough to have a combine monitor, much less the ability to transfer data to a computer. Having a solution in place to integrate data and give farmers an entry point into carbon markets is critical as a measurement of our sustainable contributions to the planet.”

AgriNovus says more than 90% of Indiana producers are not participating in the Carbon market, but 67% plan to do so in the future.

In addition to the $25,000 grand prize, the winning team will also receive financial advisory services from Chicago-based Sikich LLP and creative branding services from The PLAID Agency in Carmel. To win the challenge, teams must develop a solution that will:

1. Integrate years of multiple data sources from across farm operations to create a market-ready data set with minimal farmer manual data entry.
2. Provides a “good” and “best” option that enables farmers to use field-level data from modern machinery (“best”) and aggregated farm operations data and publicly available data (“good”);
3. Have a path to commercialize the solution by 2022.

Registration for the Producer-Led Innovation Challenge ends July 9. You can find more information, including how to register, by clicking here.