Manage all your fields in one place
Weather, activities & harvest — every field tells its story
Log any activity in seconds
Snap a photo, know the disease instantly
Grow together with fellow farmers

Inspiration

In Indonesia, most farmers still track everything in their heads or in worn notebooks — when they fertilized, sprayed, or harvested. There's no data history, so every decision is guesswork. And when crops get sick, expert help is hard to reach: agricultural officers are few, and diseases destroy harvests before answers arrive.

I asked a simple question: what if every farmer had an agronomist in their pocket? That's why I built BerTani — from the Indonesian word for farming.

What it does

BerTani is a smart farming assistant for Indonesian farmers:

Manage land — register multiple plots with photos, crop types, size, and GPS location
Log activities by voice — farmers speak naturally ("I fertilized 50 kg today") and AI converts it into structured records; manual logging works too
Diagnose plant diseases — snap a photo of a leaf and AI identifies the disease, severity, and treatment steps
Field weather & humidity trends — hyperlocal forecasts so farmers know the best time to spray or irrigate
Harvest tracking — complete harvest history with total yield
Sobat Tani chatbot — an AI agronomist available 24/7 in Indonesian
Community & gamification — XP, levels, 6 claimable badges, reputation, and a farmer leaderboard
Monetization — premium subscription + coin economy powered by RevenueCat

Everything is designed for real field conditions: dirty hands, one free hand, low literacy barriers — so voice-first input matters.

How we built it

React Native + TypeScript for Android & iOS
Supabase: auth (with anonymous → Google account migration so guests never lose data), PostgreSQL with Row Level Security, storage buckets, and 7 Edge Functions for all sensitive logic
Google Gemini AI powering four features: chatbot, photo diagnosis, voice-to-activity parsing, and content moderation — with a model fallback chain for reliability
RevenueCat SDK for subscriptions and coin packs, synced via webhook to keep entitlements consistent
Open-Meteo API for hyperlocal weather, with dynamic endpoint configuration
Native Android module + WebView for speech recognition
Local scheduled notifications (@notifee) for farming reminders based on each user's land data

Challenges we ran into

Turning messy human speech into clean data. Farmers don't speak in forms. I built a Gemini-powered parser that extracts category, quantity, and notes from free-form speech.
AI cost sustainability. Every scan/chat costs money. The solution: coins earned through engagement (daily login, badges) or purchased directly, while premium subscribers get unlimited AI usage.
Reliability. A single model failure can't break the app — hence the multi-model fallback chain across all AI features.
Android lifecycle crashes from fragment restoration that only appeared in production — fixed at the activity level.
Safety first. AI advice about pesticides can affect livelihoods, so moderation and prompt guardrails came before features.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Shipped a fully working app on Google Play during the contest window — not a prototype
Voice logging actually works with natural Indonesian speech, not rigid commands
A complete monetization stack: subscriptions, consumable coin packs, rewarded ads, and interstitials — all through RevenueCat
Gamification that makes daily record-keeping feel rewarding instead of like a chore

What we learned

Shipping early beats perfection — releasing during the contest forced fast iteration based on real user feedback
AI products need graceful failure modes; users trust an app that degrades gracefully more than one that's "smart" but fragile
Designing for your users' physical reality (one hand, sunlight, noise) changes every product decision
Monetization must fit the audience: smallholder farmers won't pay upfront, but they will pay for value at the moment of need

What's next for BerTani

Automated care schedules predicted from crop type, weather, and activity history
Exportable reports (PDF/CSV) so farmers can access subsidies and financing
Deeper community features: forums, following, and knowledge sharing between regions
iOS release to reach more farmers
Partnering with local agricultural agencies to bring verified disease data into the Plant Clinic