Walton researchers attend Teagasc’s ‘Catalysing Connections’ event 

Catalysing Connections is a pilot pre-accelerator programme hosted by Teagasc that aims to foster novel idea generation, innovation, and entrepreneurship in early career researchers from the VistaMilk SFI Research Centre. 

Catalysing Connections event

The event on 3 October 2022 was the culmination of a five-month programme of entrepreneurial training, topical discussion panels from experienced Irish company founders, and the exploration of novel ideas for the thirty participants. 

Multidisciplinary teams of postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers collaborated to apply the VistaMilk “Measure-Predict-Act” approach to the grand challenges confronting the Agri-Food sector. Technology Transfer Offices from VistaMilk, participating universities, and research institutions including Walton Institute, Teagasc, University College Dublin, Tyndall National Institute, University of Galway, and Dublin City University, have mentored and supported the teams. 

Each multidisciplinary team was provided with a ‘Grand Challenge’ from a series of topics currently facing the Agri-Food sector: 

● Soil – Next generation Soil Nitrogen management 
● Pasture – Next Generation Pasture and Grassland Management 
● Animal/Cow – Next generation digital tool for on-farm animal health management 
● Food – Sustainability in Food Production without over Processing 
● Carbon – How do we move beyond current methods of carbon sequestration monitoring? 

Waltons involvement

Three VistaMilk researchers from Walton Institute – Thakshila Wedage, Muhammad Zawish and Hao Shi – were excited to participate in the challenges. 

Thakshila Wedage took part in the Carbon challenge. Their goal was to develop a system model that educates and informs farmers (and other stakeholders) on how to manage land use to increase carbon sequestration, which is critical to Irish agriculture’s transition to carbon neutrality. 

They proposed novel measurement techniques to collect big data using 6G wireless communication links and drones as their solution. Furthermore, they proposed a mobile application and a website that graphically and numerically presents the combined measurement and predicted data regarding carbon sequestration to users in order for them to be able to take necessary actions. This decision support tool would assist farmers in increasing farm profitability. 

Hao Shi Took part in the Animal/Cow challenge. Their team’s concept was to create a platform for predicting cow diseases like mastitis. An unhealthy cow costs a farmer €10,000 on an average Irish farm. Currently, health management options are insufficient and dispersed across multiple apps/websites or devices, making it difficult to provide a simple, user-friendly overview of the herd or individual cow. Hao’s team’s solution, the VistaHub, would address these concerns. 

Muhammad Zawish took part in the Pasture challenge and presented the idea of PASTURE PRO, a Digital Twin platform for gathering, analysing, and generating insights based on data obtained from various modalities already in place on farms. 

Walton’s Lizy Abraham was also proud to present her research at the event. Lizy presented a poster pertaining to Farmland habitats that are an important component of Irish biodiversity, ranging from highly managed arable land in the east to smaller wetter fields in the west. As a result, automatic labelling and classification of farmland habitats in Ireland is critical. Traditional methods of habitat identification rely on resource-intensive field surveys, so there is a strong need for digital methods to improve the speed and efficiency of identifying farmland habitats. 

Her study presents a preliminary method for accurately classifying farmland using stacked ensemble deep convolutional neural networks (DNNs). The proposed method was validated using a high-resolution dataset collected by drones. 

Conclusion of the event

The Walton researchers felt Catalysing Connections was a great learning experience, and provided an excellent opportunity to collaborate with researchers from various disciplines to find a viable solution to the diverse challenges facing the AgriTech sector.