INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. – In recent years, agricultural producers have found innovative ways and opportunities to gather data from their operations. The collection of this “Big Data” is meant to bring insight to how solutions can be found for challenges facing the industry on a producer-level. However, the data alone does not solve practical problems. This is why AgriNovus Indiana recently held its first Producer-led Innovation Challenge, naming a winner earlier this month.

The winner was Team Benton Group from Ambia, Ind., in partnership with iYOTAH Solutions. The team was led by Keith Hoeing, who is a dairy producer himself, and innovator Paul Ousterhout.

“We set out to first define challenges by producers,” said Mitch Frazier, president and CEO of AgriNovus. “Then we would use that definition to inspire and equip tech companies and innovators all across the state to solve these problems. This is a problem that we have, producers see it in the dairy business, we see it all across agriculture.”

From accounting, to inventory, to complex production and land data, farms have a lot to keep track of. The AgriNovus competition challenged teams of innovators to solve this critical need for software that not only stores, but also analyzes, organizes and pieces together insights across different categories of data to form solutions. The winner had to develop a solution that could integrate with current farm technologies, articulate the benefits to the producer clearly and develop a road map to commercialize the solution in the new year. The grand prize was $25,000 granted by the Purdue Foundry.

“Dairy farms are what we call ‘DRIP’, that is, data rich and information poor,” Ousterhout explained. “You’ve got all this data but it’s really hard to make it actionable. When I first met Keith, we walked into his office and there are three different computer screens, three different software, and right away, part of the challenge is clear; these systems do talk to each other, but they really don’t produce a comprehensive solution.”

With Team Benton’s winning software, instead of seeing insights across a farm, producers can look at data pieced together from a complex network of farm-specific software and consumer software such as Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets. It also reduces manual data entry by automating aggregation of data from farm operation systems, makes data quality validation much quicker, and automates alert notifications based on farmer-defined standards and user roles. Hoeing said being chosen by his peers and fellow producers to win the competition is a great feeling.

“It means a lot,” Hoeing said. “I know that’s a super simple answer, but having your peers evaluate you and your ability to make something that affects other farmers and producers’ decisions, it’s super impactful. Data and technology are not easy to combine on farm and rarely helps us make an actual decision. We got to define our project and procedures, roles and methods, and this is us. Completely custom and it’s really special that producers picked us as the one to keep.”

AgriNovus plans to hold another producer-led competition next year as well to find specific, practical solutions to on-farm challenges.