In tech, it’s easy to get caught up in looking for the next big thing but hackathons have stood the test of time for a reason. While some have claimed vibe coding will be their death knell, Jade’s H26 Agriculture event proved that the tradition has a lot left to give.
Farming is the backbone of the New Zealand economy and, with Jade’s rapidly expanding ag client base (including the acquisition of MADCAP), we challenged our team to prototype software solutions for the agriculture sector.
Check out the incredible results:
Why do we hack?
- Sparking innovation
Giving our teams permission to think big, throw some ideas at the wall and to take risks they’d never take with customer work - Building relationships
Across teams, expertise and experience levels, for H26 we went a step further and invited partners who’ve built products on Jade to join in as well - Pressure testing
Jade Platform is the stable core of everything we do, but most of our staff aren’t actively coding every day. Putting them in the hotseat, under time pressure uncovers opportunities for improvement - Creating space
Hackathons are one way of jolting out of the BAU, creating the space people need to embrace new thinking
How it went
Three teams of six were freed from their afternoon duties for five days, to ideate, prototype and test their solutions. Then, each had 10 minutes to pitch to a judging panel of tech and ag industry experts, with a full audience ready for a Q&A.
While Jade has a proud history of hackathons, H26 proved to be something special. This was our first since the popular rise of vibe coding, and the careful use of AI tools certainly helped our teams to level up - one group had a basic prototype running before the end of the first afternoon.
As you’d expect, participants also had some cautionary tales when it came to making changes and refining AI-coded programmes that they didn’t understand.
What they made
Team Cow-Operative – ‘Legalease’
This software was designed to solve a problem that has been ‘turning farmers into office workers since 1991’, regulatory compliance. The platform centralises regulatory information, automates paperwork, and integrates mapping and AI to streamline reporting. Simply put, it cuts down the admin burden to get farmers back doing what they do best.
With four out of the six team members being graduate engineers, Cow-Operative really embodied the spirit of learning for H26.
“The most fun part was being able to see it come together and seeing people really learning and getting outside their comfort zones. It was a great opportunity for people to play around with technologies that they’ve never touched before,” Michelle Hsieh, Cow-Operative Team Lead
Team Farmhouse – ‘Farmhouse’
Our People’s choice winner, Farmhouse is a mobile-first app designed to reduce farmer burnout by bringing together pasture, livestock, equipment, mapping, and weather data into a single, clear dashboard. It distils the noise to give farmers a complete picture of their operation, anywhere, anytime.
Team Leader, Luke Woollett, reflected on the experience “This is the fifth hackathon I’ve been part of at Jade and elsewhere, and this was absolutely the best group I’ve been part of, and the best set of presentations I’ve ever seen.”
The winner
Team Knights of the Round Stable – ‘Big Brooder’
Big Brooder
The big winner homed in on one critical issue in poultry farming – maintaining the right brooding temperature for chicks in their first 14 days. Big Brooder monitors clustering behaviour and automatically makes micro adjustments for a more precise result than what is possible with human intervention. The result higher survival rates and healthier chicks.
Knights of the Round Stable’s bold decision to run a live demonstration was one of the most memorable moments of the event. With ping pong balls standing in for chicks, the audience and judges were able to see Big Brooder’s cluster detection feature running in real time.
Team Leader, Chiron Evans, confessed that there was some tactical thinking behind the risk “I knew we could do it, part of the draw of the idea we chose was having a practical element we could live demo… We knew we could have things there so people could actually see it working,” he shared “It’s less of a leap to go from that to the final product.”
What the judges saw
Alongside Jade CEO Justin Mercer, leaders from Skipton Group, Fonterra, MADCAP and Dairy NZ brought deep sector knowledge to the judging panel. For Dave Maslen, General Manager Strategy & Commercial Partnerships at Dairy NZ, this was his first hackathon experience and he was left inspired.
“It’s really easy in the New Zealand ag sector to identify problems, it’s a lot harder to identify solutions to them and for me that’s where the magic happens. When you can get creative brains together with people with the technical capability to take an idea and bring it through to a solution," he said.
So why was this good for Jade?
We don’t go into hackathons expecting a ready-to-market commercial product. The real benefits for Jade are little less tangible but no less valuable.
- Connections built
Team members who may have never interacted day-to-day have now built strong bonds and learnt each other’s strengths. Now, they know where to go for support when problem solving for our clients. - Tools tested
More staff getting hands-on with the Jade Platform is an absolute plus for product knowledge and testing, but Jade is compatible with many other technologies for teams to learn or teach each other. - Learnings gained
While the competition element adds pressure, hackathons provide a low-stakes way to try things out. For one thing, this year’s teams are now well aware of the benefits (and pitfalls!) of vibe coding. - Creativity sparked
Innovation sometimes needs a catalyst and you couldn’t ask for a better spark than a hackathon. - Genuine excitement delivered
Put simply, culture matters and hackathons are fun. There are few events that bring as much real joy, camaraderie and energy to the office as H26 did. The excitement was infectious with the fun spreading far beyond the 18 individuals who were actively competing.