Hackathon for Hawaii agriculture yields valuable crop

The first-ever hackathon to improve Hawaii agriculture using computer technology has produced a smart camera prototype that could be valuable to the state’s biggest coffee farm.

A team with members from Oceanit Labs, Kauai Coffee Co. and Kamehameha Schools won first place and $3,000 in what was dubbed the AGathon for developing a camera trained to count and categorize coffee cherries as they are mechanically harvested so that fewer unripe cherries are collected.

Fred Cowell, general manager of the coffee farm, said with some doable improvements the camera system could be ready for use on the 3,000-acre farm by the start of this year’s harvest season and improve the annual crop yield by $250,000.

Kauai Coffee uses 10 machines that pass over and shake trees to dislodge cherries 24-hours a day during the harvest season between September and December. The driving speed and shaking force of the machines is adjustable, and could be optimized on the spot if operators could see the ratio between ripe and unripe cherries using a camera mounted on each harvester.

“It gives us a real-time feedback loop of our machines’ performance,” Cowell said.

Ian Kitajima, director of corporate development for Oceanit, said a computer chip on the camera can be programmed to recognize other images to make them useful in different applications.

“We could train it on something else,” he said. “It’s really an enabling technology.”

Ten teams participated in the AGathon, which started Saturday and wrapped up Sunday.

Other outstanding results included an app to help non-­English-speaking farmers access information in their native language, and a program generating electronic forms for farmers to comply with federal regulations.

The event was sponsored by the state Department of Agriculture, Hawaii Technology Development Corp., Ulupono Initiative, Transform Hawaii Government Coalition, Smart Yields, Whitmore Economic Development Group and Hawaii Open Data.