About the Challenge

Can you tell what happened in a cornfield from space?

Hack the Harvest is a two-day hackathon for students from any discipline, hosted by USDA, NVIDIA, the Center for Analytics and Technology in Society at UC Davis, and HMCI. Teams will use public geospatial data, AI and creative problem solving to answer a real USDA question: was a cornfield harvested for silage or for grain?

Silage corn is usually harvested early, while it's still green. Grain corn usually stays in the field longer and dries down before harvest. That difference is subtle and noisy, and it's easy to miss from far away. But the signal is there. Can you find it?

  • When: November 14 to 15, 2026
  • Where: Aggie Square, 4480 2nd Ave, Sacramento, CA
  • Who: 200 undergraduate, graduate and doctoral students, in teams of 5 to 7 formed before the event
  • Build window: 22.5 hours, from Saturday 10:30 a.m. to Sunday 9 a.m.

You don't need to know how to code. Strong teams mix engineers, data scientists, business, and management thinkers.

Get Started

  1. Register and join or form a team of 5 to 7 here on Devpost.
  2. Join the event Discord for announcements, team coordination and support.
  3. Attend the one-hour online orientation, the day before the event. It covers the challenge, Keeboh and Devpost submissions. 
  4. Review the background materials, prior work summaries and starter notebooks. Test your Keeboh access ahead of time.
  5. Bring a laptop, a charger and some curiosity.

You can do background reading, team formation, account setup and access testing ahead of time. Competition work, challenge-specific model training and judged deliverables can't start until Saturday at 10:30 a.m.

Schedule (All Times Pacific)

Saturday, November 14: Discover and Build

  • 9:00 a.m. Check-in opens, with refreshments and sponsor booths
  • 10:30 a.m. Building begins
  • 12:30 p.m. Lunch with sponsors
  • 3:00 p.m. Nearby hotel workspace opens for overnight building

Sunday, November 15: Build and Show

  • 9:00 a.m. Submissions close on Devpost
  • 10:00 a.m. Teams return to Aggie Square for sponsor sessions and career conversations
  • 11:30 a.m. Every team member present, and finalists announced
  • 12:15 p.m. Live finals begin
  • 1:50 p.m. Awards and closing, finished by 2:30 p.m.

To stay eligible for overall awards, every team member must check in individually at Aggie Square by 11:30 a.m. Sunday and stay through the awards ceremony. Emergency or accessibility exceptions need approval from the event lead.

Requirements

What to Build

Build a data-driven solution that tells silage cornfields apart from grain cornfields, using only publicly available geospatial data. There's no single right approach. For example, you could:

  • Track changes over time: compare vegetation and satellite imagery across harvest windows.
  • Find patterns in the data: combine public datasets, build field-level time-series models, or identify spectral and temporal signatures.
  • Deliver an answer people can use: build a classification model or an interpretable visualization, or find a completely different signal.

Resources include satellite imagery, crop and agricultural data, field boundaries and other geospatial data, plus the Keeboh technical workspace. NVIDIA Nemotron is optional.

What to Submit

Submit by Sunday, November 15 at 9:00 a.m. Pacific:

  1. Your project on Devpost, describing your approach, the data you used and your results
  2. A demo or pitch video of no more than 3 minutes

Judging (draft rubric): Technical Approach and Evidence 30%, Creativity and Innovation 25%, Presentation and Demonstration 25%, Relevance and Practical Value to USDA 20%.

Four finalist teams advance to the live finals. Each gets 7 minutes to present and 3 minutes for questions. Final rules and prize details will be shared before the event.

Hackathon Sponsors

Prizes

$5,000+ in prizes
+ other prizes
Grand Prize
$5,000 in cash
1 winner

$600 in Nvidia Brev Credits
1 winner

Awarded to the team that makes the best use of NVIDIA Nemotron

Nvidia RTX 5080 GPU
2 winners

Two lucky participants will win an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080

Devpost Achievements

Submitting to this hackathon could earn you:

<%= name %>
<% if (has_levels) { %> level <%= next_level %> <% } %>

Judges

Sadie St Lawrence

Sadie St Lawrence
HMCI

Marybeth Kavanagh

Marybeth Kavanagh
UC Davis

Chloe Hall

Chloe Hall
USDA

Alexander Adams

Alexander Adams
USDA

Justin Van Wart

Justin Van Wart
USDA

Punit Vats

Punit Vats
Niantic Spatial

Rotimi Adetunji

Rotimi Adetunji
Niantic Spatial

Judging Criteria

  • TBD