As part of an initiative to encourage youth involvement in the agricultural sector, the Department of Computing in the Faculty of Science & Technology encourages students to participate in the regional AgriHack coding competition, organized by the Dutch Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA). This requires them to create a solution to a problem selected from six pre-defined problem categories, with each category outlining persistent, unresolved issues in the Caribbean agricultural sector.

Team Node 420, comprising four students from the Department, won the competition in 2014. Node 420 is a system built around a prototype hardware device that can be placed in a farm or any field to collect and transmit real-time climate data and relay the data to a software system which then performs analysis. The team focused on challenges around collecting climate data and their product aimed to provide low-cost data collection devices and in-depth analysis to support farmers and associated authorities.