This is part three in our Pega Community Hackathon profile series. In this series we profile 2021 Hackathon participants and ask them about their process for creating top-performing applications.
With over 640 participants in the 2021 Pega Community Hackathon, there was no shortage of unique, innovative submissions for our judges to evaluate. There was, however, one submission that truly stood out for its ability to incorporate Pega technologies in order to improve an obstacle that an entire industry in the team’s home country is facing.
Although the eight members of the Innovation Award-winning Farm Easy team are employed by Commonwealth Bank of Australia (a Pega client), each of the team members grew up in India and are currently based at CommBank’s delivery center in Bangaluru. The team came together during the Pega Community Hackathon to help create a solution to a critical issue in India: farmers' lack of adequate technologies for crop forecasting and rainfall tracking.
“The agriculture sector is about 20 percent of India’s GDP and it’s an industry that impacts every Indian citizen,” explained Rahul Joshi of the Farm Easy team. “I’ve always thought about the huge challenges that farmers in India are facing in order to maximize the growth of their crops during monsoon season and sell those crops without the need for intermediaries who can take a significant portion of their income. That's why this idea was in the back of my mind.”
According to Joshi, his team conducted extensive research in order to understand the scientific parameters involved in how soil can be measured and the types of weather factors that farmers need to take under consideration for harvesting. There was also no central repository where the Farm Easy team could access crop data from farming areas in the interior and remote portions of the country. This required the Farm Easy team to locate various government websites for sourcing weather and geographical data and integrate this information into the Farm Easy app with publicly available APIs.
“Every team member was busy working on other projects as we transitioned to our new delivery center in Bangaluru, but we all wanted to help create a solution as part of the Pega Community Hackathon to help solve these issues facing the agricultural industry in our country,” said Gurushankar Neelanna of the Farm Easy team. “Hopefully we were able to unleash the power of Pega by putting this important data in the hands of the farming community that needs it most of all.”
You can find additional posts in the Pega Community Hackathon 2021 profile series below:
Recommended resources:
- Read more about our Community Hackathon here, or read our press release.
- Check out the Farm Easy submission.
Don’t forget
JOIN THE CONVERSATION on Collaboration Center
FOLLOW @PegaDeveloper on Twitter
SUBSCRIBE to the Pega Developer Podcast on Spotify or via RSS