Background
Hort Innovation is the grower-owned, not-for-profit research and development corporation for Australia's horticulture industry.
Our role is to advance Australia’s $16 billion horticulture industry by investing in research and development, marketing and trade to build a prosperous and sustainable future for growers.
We partner with Australian and international co-investors including government, leading science, technology, and consumer strategy experts to anticipate future challenges and opportunities. Our role is to capture value from the investments we make to benefit all levy payers.
Challenge
The horticulture sector thrives on data from diverse sources – remote sensors, weather stations, soil quality parameters, crop health indicators, satellite imagery, market trends, etc. However, the lack of a seamless integration strategy poses a significant hurdle for growers and agronomists who seek to translate data into effective decisions. Hort Innovation invites innovators, problem solvers and innovative organizations to revolutionize the way growers and agronomists harness the power of data in the ever-evolving landscape of horticulture.
This challenge focuses on tackling the complexities of integrating, interpreting, and utilizing multiple data sources to provide actionable insights to support growers and agronomists in their decision-making process.
Our main areas of focus involve:
- Data integration and insights, looking at how we can the intricate layers of complex and large spatial and temporal data be effectively ingested.
- Technology Agnostic Analysis: technologies that offer agnostic services for data analysis.
- Decision-Making Amid Variability: identifying ways that can help growers make informed decisions that lead to successful outcomes.
- Error Management and Prevention: technological solutions that can be devised to manage and prevent errors, ensuring the reliability and accuracy.
This is an opportunity to reshape the horticulture industry by addressing these critical data utilization challenges. Participants are encouraged to devise innovative strategies, algorithms, and tools that bridge the gap between data and actionable insights. By doing so, they will contribute to a future where data empowers growers and agronomists to make decisions that drive productivity, sustainability, and growth.
Key Success Criteria:
- Real-time Insights: The solution must provide timely and actionable insights to aid decision-making.
- Data Integration: Successful integration of diverse data sources, including weather data, crop information, market trends and more. In addition to that, new data sources should be easily integrated into the solution.
- Solution efficacy: The solution should significantly improve the accuracy and speed of management decisions within horticulture industries.
- Scalability: The solution should be scalable to accommodate increasing data volumes.
- Cost-effective: The solution should be cost-effective to facilitate widespread adoption among growers.
- User-Friendly: An intuitive and user-friendly interface for easy access and interaction with insights.
Possible Approaches:
- Centralized Platform
- Natural Language Processing
- Generative AI
- Machine Leaning Models
What we aren’t interested in:
- More complex dashboards
What's in it for you?
This is a global challenge, and Hort Innovation is willing to collaborate with innovative companies, researchers, universities, and technical solution providers. A successful collaboration could mean funding for the solution through the Hort-Frontier co-investment mechanism. It is important to mention that although the implemented solution must be available in Australia, the implementation can be carried out anywhere in the world.