Farm Carbon Footprint Estimator

Farm Carbon Footprint Estimator — a cross-platform C tool to calculate agricultural GHG emissions from crops, pesticides, fuel, irrigation & livestock, with clear sustainability advice.

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Inspiration

Farmers need a lightweight, user-friendly, portable, and cross-platform offline tool to estimate the real carbon footprint of their agricultural activities, grounded in current scientific recommendations. This is especially important in the context of global climate change, as agriculture is among the sectors with the highest impact on greenhouse gas emissions.

What it does

The app calculates the carbon footprint of agricultural activities at the farm level taking into account both crop production and livestock sectors.

Farmers can:

  • Enter multiple crops with their cultivated area or use .csv file in the batch mode.
  • Add fertilizer, manure, irrigation, fuel use, and pesticides.
  • Automatically apply emission factors from scientific literature.
  • View results in an easy-to-read summary table with totals per crop and for the entire farm.
  • Receive scientifically sound recommendations on the farm management in order to mitigate excessive carbon footprint.
  • Save reports and recommendations in the .txt file for further usage.
  • Run in multiple modes: interactive CLI, simple UI, or batch CSV input.

How we built it

The application was built in pure C (C99 standard) with standard libraries only.

Challenges we ran into

It was somewhat complicated to build even the modest UI with no external libraries.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Built a fully functional, cross-platform carbon footprint calculator that works offline with no external dependencies.
  • Successfully integrated multi-crop support and realistic emission factors based on current scientific recommendations.
  • Implemented a user-friendly interface in both CLI and simple UI modes, despite limitations of not using external libraries.
  • Created a tool that can genuinely help farmers assess and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in an accessible way.

What we learned

  • The main thing is that I improved my knowledge and received practical skills on how to build a simple UI in C without external libraries and even make it attractive.
  • Also, I received new knowledge on the scientific methodology for GHG emissions estimation from agricultural activities.

What's next for Farm Carbon Footprint Estimator

There are different directions for further app improvement, but I would like to focus mainly on:

  • Expanding database coverage: add more crops, livestock types, and commonly used pesticides with verified emission factors.
  • Improve usability: enhance the UI with optional colors, charts, and better visualization of emission breakdowns.
  • Localization support: provide translations and unit conversions for global adoption.
  • Validation with real farm data: collaborate with agricultural institutions to calibrate and test emission factors in practice.

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