AgrEAssist - a digital solution for farmers

The solution assists the farmers timely by notifying on unfavorable weather conditions. The solution eliminates the hurdles and exploitations associated with middleman in selling the produce(s).

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Inspiration

It’s not easy being a farmer these days and it’s bound to get harder, with more and more cosmopolitan culture catching-up in terms of shifting of occupation to fancier streams, and conversion of farm lands into residential and commercial lands due to poor hope on crop returns. Sowing, nurturing and harvesting - all these are dependent on Mother Nature. The farmers need proactive and automatic assistance in addition to manual monitoring. This thought process pressed us come up with digital assistance for the farmers. Courtesy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnbHjo-VjlU

Other problem is re the middlemen who procure the produce at the base price set by government citing quality issues with the produce. This problem needs to be eliminated via a regulatory process and direct connect between the farmer and the buyer. Courtesy: https://www.onmanorama.com/news/kerala/2021/03/28/kerala-election-news-kottayam-paddy-farmers-crisis.html

What it does

The application offers two things:

  1. Triggering automatic and in-time alerts about any unfavorable weather conditions such as heavy rainfall, high windspeed, high/low temperature etc. The alerts are based on the real-time location of the farmer, or can be based on the farmer's crop location.
  2. Online sale of produces from the farmer with regulated prices and quality of each of the produce, thus eliminating the middleman's exploitation.

How we built it

Leveraging the latest version of Pega (8.7) and utlizing the App Studio and out-of-the-box features of Pega for almost 95% of the application, the following features have been built in:

  1. Real-time integration with https://openweathermap.org/api website and passing the GPS detected latitude & longitude of the farmer logging in.
  2. Fetching the real-time weather conditions for the day for a particular region based on the latitude & longitude of the farmer.
  3. Job scheduler to trigger notifications automatically at a particular time of the day for any unfavorable weather conditions.
  4. Option to manually notify the farmer on any unforeseen weather abruptions.
  5. Online portal for farmers to list the produce with details including quality, price, quantity, image etc.
  6. A government appointed regulator who can unbiasedly regulate the price of each produce based on the region, quality/grade of produce and the current market demand.
  7. Buyers can search, look and buy produce directly from the farmers. It must be noted here that the listings are already validated and approved by a government appointed regulator.
  8. Notifications to various users upon produce listed, listings being approved/rejected, produce being sold and ofcourse the abnormal weather alerts.
  9. Graphical representation of reports on dashboards for users.

Challenges we ran into

  1. Having to manage the Hackathon along with the regular project works. However, this was offset due to the App Studio which enabled quick implementation.
  2. Leveraging Pega weather widget. This caused issues as it didn't work during implementation hence, we had to build it from scratch and we integrated with the weather API.
  3. Limited availability and partial list of open-source weather information via integration.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  1. Implement the prototype with limited available time from the resources.
  2. Ability to utilize OOTB features from the platform for the most part of it.
  3. The idea of the solution and being hopeful to roll-out the product in the market that solves the current issues the farmers face.

What we learned

  1. Integration with weather API and ability to dynamically fetch weather details in real-time.
  2. An insight into current problems of farmers.

What's next for AgrEAssist - a digital solution to farmers

  1. Integration with SMS gateway to trigger SMS for far-reaching connectivity.
  2. Farmer based, crop based and region based notifications to provide personalized alerts.
  3. Mobile app to enable mobility.
  4. Scope for auctioning of exotic produce(s) wherein the buyers can bid for a produce and the highest bid shall be honored.
  5. Extension of the application to host dairy products and alerts on any cattle diseases.
  6. Farmers can get to know the demand and tastes of the consumers through insights captured as part of the buying processes. Accordingly the farmers can decide on the crop and the timing.
  7. Farmers can capture feedback and ratings on the produces sold. This would be a continuous improvement process.
  8. Inclusion of QR code as part of buying to make the process faster and induce process efficiency.

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