Name: Hack the Harvest
Start: 2026-11-14T13:30:00.000-05:00
End: 2026-11-15T12:00:00.000-05:00
Location: Hack the Harvest

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

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

Livestream Q&A

Join our livestream Q&A on Friday, November 13 at 5:00 p.m. Pacific on Microsoft Teams: Join the livestream

Schedule (All Times Pacific)

Saturday, November 14: Discover and Build

9:00 a.m. Check-in opens at the East Civic Lounge entrance (garage side), with refreshments and sponsor booths
9:30 a.m. Check-in closes and opening remarks begin. Every team member must be checked in by 9:30 a.m.
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, and check-in opens at Aggie Square
10:00 a.m. Teams return to Aggie Square for sponsor sessions and career conversations
11:00 a.m. Check-in closes. Every team member must be checked in by 11:00 a.m.
11:30 a.m. Finalists announced
12:15 p.m. Live finals begin
2:00 p.m. Awards and closing, finished by 2:30 p.m.

Check-In Rules

Every team member checks in individually and in person on both days at the East Civic Lounge entrance (garage side). Bring your student ID.

Saturday: Check-in runs from 9:00 to 9:30 a.m. If you are not checked in by 9:30 a.m., you can't participate in Hack the Harvest. Once building starts at 10:30 a.m., you can work from anywhere.
Sunday: Check-in opens at 9:00 a.m. Every participant must be back and checked in by 11:00 a.m. and stay through the awards ceremony.

Prize eligibility: Teams with at least 5 members checked in on both days can compete for all prizes. Teams with fewer than 5 can still compete for the NVIDIA Nemotron Award, but not the grand prize.

GPU raffle: NVIDIA will raffle two RTX 5080 GPUs, one overnight at the hotel workspace and one at the awards ceremony. Checked-in participants receive raffle tickets. You must be present at the drawing to win, and there's one GPU per person.

Day-of registration: Students can register at check-in on Saturday. Students without a team can join one at check-in, but we can't guarantee placement.

Does everyone have to be on site the whole time? No. Everyone must be at Aggie Square for Saturday check-in by 9:30 a.m. and the opening program. After building starts at 10:30 a.m., you can work at Aggie Square, the hotel workspace or anywhere else. Everyone must be back and checked in by 11:00 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:

Your project in Keeboh, describing your approach, the data you used and your results
A demo or pitch video of no more than 3 minutes

Judging (USDA rubric, 25 points total):

Technical Quality (scored 1 to 5, 20%): business insights from a well-trained model, metrics such as precision, recall, false positive rate and response time measured against evaluation data, and a mature modeling strategy
Innovation and Creativity (scored 1 to 5, 20%): an unexpected or well-executed new approach, including new data sources or harvest signals that improve prediction scores
Feasibility and Mission Alignment (scored 1 to 5, 20%): how well the prototype addresses silage versus grain corn field predictions, and its potential for further development
Presentation (scored 1 to 10, 40%): how effectively the team demonstrates the solution, its value, its process and how it could be developed further

Ties go to the team with the higher Presentation score.

Four finalist teams advance to the live finals. Each gets 7 minutes to present and 3 minutes for questions.

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

NVIDIA will raffle two RTX 5080 GPUs, one overnight at the hotel workspace and one at the awards ceremony. Checked-in participants receive raffle tickets. You must be present at the drawing to win, and there's one GPU per person.