This was DLG.prototype.club 2025

AGRITECHNICA 2025 was more than a week at the world’s leading agricultural fair — it showed how quickly ideas turn into solutions when startups, corporates, and researchers work side by side. Here’s what happened.

For prototype.club, this meant three central moments: the demos of the PTx Challenge on Monday, the full innovation programme on Thursday with the DLG Hackathon and the Open Innovation Showcase, and once again the Startup Factory Masterclass as a hub of conversations with both familiar faces and new players. The theme was clear: open innovation isn’t optional — it’s necessary.

The PTx Challenge – Turning a complex problem into seven distinct solutions

The week kicked off with one of the more technical challenges we’ve hosted:
“3D-Based Path Planning for Agricultural Machinery.”

PTx invited startups and research teams to design algorithms capable of generating optimised, fuel-saving and adaptive field paths – not just in two, but in three dimensions. What could have been an abstract academic exercise instead became a high-energy competition. The teams didn’t bring concepts; they brought functioning approaches based on the data provided by PTx.

While the jury expected variations of the same solution, they got the opposite. Each team uncovered different angles, different logics, different interpretations of the problem. A key message from the jury room: the diversity of thinking revealed opportunities PTx hadn’t considered yet, expanding PTx’s perspective on what future collaborations could look like.

This year also marked the second collaboration between AGCO and prototype.club, strengthening a partnership built on technical depth and genuine exploration. Congratulations again to the winners of the PTx Challenge 2025:

🥇 Verge Ag
🥈 Nature Robotics
🥉 FindKlein

The evening concluded in the AGCO Lounge, where discussions quickly moved from “what was built” to “what comes next”. Both sides left with a clear message: this challenge didn’t end at the award ceremony — it started something.

DLG Hackathon — One day. One use case. Real prototypes.

At the DLG Hackathon, developers, students and young innovators worked on use cases from Bosch and ITK Engineering around precision spraying alogrithms and biodiversity. Teams explored how existing solutions can be combined with new logic to ensure accurate spraying, improve resource efficiency and safeguard species.

The winning team, Agrosense, delivered an impressively clear and scalable idea in only a few hours – a dmonstrated approach that mentors and partners immediately found as „ready to grow“. Alongside the hackathon, the Biodiersity Workshop with BioMonitor4CAP brought together perspectives from ecology, data sciene and agriculture. The conversations revolved around how to capturelong-term ecosystem health and how technology can support resilience instead of short-term snapshots.

DLG Hackathon Hackers working with Mentors

DLG Hackathon Hackers working on solutions

DLG Open Innovation Showcase — New perspectives, new signals

The DLG Open Innovation Showcase created one of the most dynamic exchanges of the entire week. Created by DLG, Corporate perspectives, academic insights and startup speed all met in the same room — and it worked.Several sessions explored how startup solutions drive smart farming technologies.

Contributions in our session came from PTx and their winning team Verge Agriculture, as well as from Fraunhofer IGD, tying back to the challenge jointly hosted in previous years. The Agency for Business & Economic Development offered a global angle by highlighting international collaboration opportunities across markets. It was a rare moment where very different types of innovation pathways were given the same stage — and together formed a clearer picture of where the industry is heading.

Tanja Rückert, CDO at Bosch, also stopped by the DLG.prototype.club. She took the opportunity to see the hackathon teams’ ideas firsthand and to get insights into NevoNex — Bosch’s open, cross-manufacturer technology that brings digital services directly onto agricultural machinery. It clearly shows how essential Open Innovation formats have become for companies.

A diverse array of partnerships

Looking Back — and Forward

AGRITECHNICA 2025 was a powerful reminder that innovation in agriculture accelerates when people with different skill sets work on the same problem.

From advanced path-planning to biodiversity insights, from prototypes built in eight hours to long-term research collaborations — this week showed what becomes possible when the boundaries between startups, corporates, researchers and young talent dissolve.

We’re proud of every team, partner, mentor, and expert who helped make these days what they were. And we’re already looking forward to what grows from here.