ARSX2023 - Secure Future Food Systems Through Safe and Sustainable Agriculture

This is an internal challenge for the Agriculture Research Service (ARS), United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). Team captains must be an ARS scientist or post-doctoral researcher.

The theme for ARSX2023 is sustainable agriculture solutions for nutrition security. We are looking for innovative ideas and sustainable solutions that will be essential to achieving nutrition security, such as:

• Dramatically optimizing for nutrition through food production and distribution systems with less waste and more access. 
• Solutions that address rapid adaptation of nutrient dense food production to environmental changes like climate, pathogens, and other extrinsic pressures (e.g. One Health approaches). 
• Solutions that expand the nutritional qualities, palatability, and variety of food for shifts in  people’s preferences regarding food they eat. 
• Solutions that address technological advancements that bring awareness of nutrient  absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion in animals and people.

This challenge will award up to three teams submitting the most compelling proposals up to $100,000 each to demonstrate proofs of concept for their ideas. If you’ve had a bold and/or unconventional idea in this area in the back of your mind, now is the time to act!  

In ARSX2023, the teams submitting the 10 most compelling ideas will be selected as Phase 1 winners (finalists).  These teams will have several weeks to participate in an innovation forum, to refine their ideas, and to build out their pitches.  At the end of Phase 2, finalists will present their pitches to a panel of judges and an audience of their peers and colleagues.  The judges will award up to $100,000 each to the top three teams.

In addition to the three $100,000 prizes, this challenge offers participants a chance to build new relationships across disciplines and geographies, and Phase 1 winners will have access to both group and individual pitch coaching.

This challenge is open to ARS personnel only.  Team captains must be scientists or post-doctoral researchers.

External collaborators are permitted only on ARS-led teams. Please see the Rules section below.

Sustainable agriculture as the solution to nutrition security.

Nutrition Security describes a system in which every person is unimpeded to obtain satisfying, safe, and nutritious food to lead an active and healthy life. But we haven’t achieved it yet, so this year’s ARSX Challenge encourages proposals that address how we will secure this future.

Nutrition security recognizes the co-existence of food insecurity and diet-related diseases and disparities. That is, nutrition security means having consistent access, availability, and affordability of foods and beverages that promote well-being and prevent disease. This focus is particularly relevant among underserved minority populations, lower income populations, and rural and remote populations that have frequently not experienced nutrition security.

The opportunity is achieving nutrition security in the context of the burgeoning population, climate change, diminishing land and water resources, environmental degradation, and changing incomes. Sustainable diets will require more than just sustainably producing more food. We need smarter ways of producing food, improvements in how we deal with food waste, and promotion of improved nutritional outcomes. Focusing on dietary diversity, agricultural surveillance and monitoring, technological advancements, and food economy sustainability, we are seeking high-risk, high-reward, creative research proposals that will change our food and nutrition opportunities/options/experiences.

Join ARSX2023 - Secure Future Food Systems: Safe and Sustainable Solutions for Nutrition Security and submit your ideas. Participation in ARSX2023 is open to any ARS scientific staff. We’re always interested in creative and impactful ideas rooted in science, but this challenge seeks to encourage bold, aspirational, and high risk ideas. This is an opportunity to test out your idea - it might be the start of something great, or it might fail smart and fast. Either way, ARSX offers a new path for uncommon scientists and their uncommon ideas. If you can draw a line from your idea to how it will ultimately enable sustainable solutions to nutrition security, then this challenge is for you! (Hint, we believe this challenge can engage all ARS science staff.) 

Challenge Breakthrough

Nutrition needs your help sustaining it. ARSX 2023 is sourcing innovative ideas and sustainable solutions that improve how we address food production and distribution systems. With regional changes around the world and shifts in people’s preferences regarding food they eat, this challenge is looking for ways to leverage technological advancements, systemic change opportunities, and more efficient processes in the nutrition continuum. 

The Challenge

ARS has been leading USDA food systems research and integrating agricultural production to meet refined nutritional requirements, including developing and leading precision nutrition research at multiple centers where scientists are generating the knowledge base needed to promote health and prevent disease throughout life. Programs have been aimed at improving human health through better nutrition, plant and animal agricultural production, and value-added processing within the context of economic, environmental, and social sustainability. Now we are asking you to take the way we think about and act on nutrition security to the next level.

How do I Win?

• This challenge is open to ARS personnel led teams only. Team captains must be scientists or post-doctoral researchers.
• External collaborators are permitted only on ARS-led teams. Please see the Rules section below.

How did previous ARSX participants benefit from the process?

Previous ARSX awardees all cite the ability to connect and collaborate with other ARS scientists across diverse geographies and disciplines as one of the top benefits.  We hear repeatedly that ARSX gave individuals an opportunity to build teams and work with others that they wouldn’t normally.  Many teams plan to continue their collaborations into future research endeavors.  Whether participants, finalists, or awardees - they all appreciate the opportunity to pursue different ideas with different collaborators.  Another aspect of ARSX that gets a lot of positive feedback is the pitch coaching that finalists receive.  This training in non-technical pitching is an opportunity to build skills that can be essential to successfully communicating your ideas and projects.

The ARSX Team will be hosting weekly office hours to discuss ideas and help answer challenge questions. Additionally, be sure to check out the Challenge Forum to engage with fellow participants, see what kinds of questions are coming up, and engage with the discussions happening around ARSX2023. 

• The ARSX2021 visionaries all approached greenhouse gas reductions in different ways, but every team mentioned the pleasure of building new teams and having a place to pursue different ideas.  Bryan Emmett, Claire Phillips, Ryan Hayes, Rod Venterea, and Florence Sessoms won for their approach to developing biological nitrification inhibition (BNI) in cover crops as a cost-effective and climate-resilient N2O mitigation solution.  They noted many positive aspects of participating in ARSX.  In addition to team building and pitch coaching, they also enjoyed being able to use the ARSX platform as a way to develop and further their idea and being able to engage with ARS administrators.  Dan Martin and his team proposed a novel technique to enhance rainfall from convective clouds by releasing electrically charged water droplets into clouds.  They were thrilled to have been selected as one of the three ARSX2021 winning teams, but what they really valued was the journey through the competition process.

• The three winners of ARSX2020 had very different approaches for keeping disruptive agricultural pests and pathogens at bay, but they all appreciated an opportunity to get their ideas - ones that might only be tangentially related to their regular research projects - out in the open.  ARSX2020 Visionaries Robert Shatters, W. Rodney Cooper, and Michelle Heck used their winnings to support automation and greenhouse and laboratory evaluations of their Plant-Host Activated-Cell Transplantation (PHACT) technology at four different USDA sites.  They appreciated how the ARSX process promoted team building across multiple disciplines and helped develop a sense of camaraderie among the team members.  The team attributes part of their success in applying for and winning a $15 million NIFA SCRI ECDRE grant to the strong team building that occurred during the process of participating in ARSX2020.  As a result of his ARSX award, ARSX2020 Visionary Vincent Ricigliano was nominated to receive a young investigator’s award and was invited to submit a proposal for a grant based on his idea for feed-based therapeutics.

If you are selected as one of the 10 finalists, you will be invited to participate in the ARSX2023 Innovation Forum.  This will be your opportunity to refine and strengthen your idea by getting input from relevant subject matter experts, by possibly building out your team to address gaps, and by receiving both individual and group pitch coaching. At the end of the Innovation Forum and training period, you will pitch your idea to a panel of judges and an audience of your peers and colleagues. The judges will select up to three winners, and each winner or winning team will receive up to $100,000 to demonstrate proof of concept for their ideas. Depending on the outcomes from initial work on winning ideas, there is the possibility for some of them to become funded research projects.

The goal of ARSX is to encourage ideas and collaborations that are outside the box and possibly quite early stage, so your ideas will be evaluated primarily based on their potential impact and overall novelty.  Secondary criteria include feasibility of the proposal. We encourage participants to collaborate and form partnerships across ARS program functions and outside of ARS. While collaboration and partnerships are not required, we have seen success from teams who come together and bring diverse thinking to their submissions.

See the Judging Criteria section for more details.

Prize

Up to 10 Phase 1 finalist teams will be eligible to participate in an innovation forum to refine their original ideas, build out their teams, and receive pitch coaching. This is a unique opportunity to interact with colleagues from other parts of the organization, to get visibility within ARS, and to develop some new skills.

Up to 3 Phase 2 winners will each receive up to $100,000 to support proof of concept work on winning ideas.

Additionally, all participants will benefit from the ARSX experience.  Submitting your idea to ARSX2023, will afford you the following:

• Opportunity to get your idea reviewed by experts outside of ARS (external evaluation panelists include experts, entrepreneurs, and innovators with perspectives that are outside of agriculture)
• Visibility both within and outside of ARS.
• Additional funding opportunities from the Innovation Fund Panel that are only open to ARSX2023 participants

Timeline

Judging Criteria

Phase 1 Criteria

 Phase 2 Criteria 

Submission Form

Rules

Participation Eligibility:

The challenge is open to all ARS personnel, but team leaders/captains must be ARS scientists or postdoctoral researchers.  External collaborators are permitted on teams led by an eligible ARS team captain.  External collaborators may originate from any country, as long as United States federal sanctions do not prohibit participation.  To determine if any federal sanctions apply, team leaders/captains must check with the Office of International Research Engagement and Cooperation (OIREC).  Please contact the OIREC international affairs specialist assigned to the external collaborator’s country (see: https://www.ars.usda.gov/office-of-international-research-engagement-and-cooperation/regional-contacts/ )

Please note that participant and applicant are used interchangeably. 

Submissions must be made in English. All challenge-related communication will be in English. 

No specific qualifications or expertise in the fields of agriculture, nutrition, or climate change is required. Prize organizers encourage individuals and cross-disciplinary teams to compete and propose new solutions. 

Ownership of Intellectual Property: 

ARS will be responsible for filing patents and IP protection for innovations created by employees and affiliates of ARS. Non-ARS judges and participants will need to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) prior to accessing information submitted in an application. Participants can be assured that any IP, whether granted or contained within a provisional application, will be protected through the application and review process of the competition.

Inventorship, including joint inventorship, of patentable developments or discoveries conceived and reduced to practice in connection with the Applicant’s participation in the Challenge during the period of Applicant’s active participation in the Challenge (“Applicant Inventions”) will be determined consistent with U.S. Patent Law.  Authorship, including joint authorship, of copyrighted works, and including computer software, created or fixed in a tangible medium of expression by Applicant in connection with Applicant’s participation in the Challenge during the period of Applicant’s active participation in the Challenge (“Applicant Copyrighted Works”) will be determined consistent with U.S. Copyright Law.  “Applicant Technology” shall include both Applicant Inventions and Applicant Copyrighted Works.”

Applicant will retain all right, title and other ownership interests in Applicant Inventions and Applicant Copyrighted Works.  Applicant will also retain all right, title and other ownership interests in Applicant’s submission and in all inventions, patents, patent applications, designs, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, software, source code, object code, processes, formulae, ideas, methods, know-how, techniques, devices, creative works, works of authorship, publications, and/or other intellectual property not included in the definition of Applicant Technology developed by Applicant during the Challenge.  Your own employment agreement is still in effect.

Selection of Winners:

Based on the winning criteria, prizes will be awarded per the Judging Criteria section above. In the case of a tie, the winner(s) will be selected based on the highest votes from the Judges.

Additional Information

By participating in the challenge, each competitor agrees to submit only their original idea. Any indication of "copying" amongst competitors is grounds for disqualification.

All applications will go through a process of due diligence; any application found to be misrepresentative, plagiarized, or sharing an idea that is not their own will be automatically disqualified.

All ineligible applicants will be automatically removed from the competition with no recourse or reimbursement.

No purchase or payment of any kind is necessary to enter or win the competition.

Void wherever restricted or prohibited by law.