FarmConnect

Inspiration

Right now, discovering local farms means digging through scattered WhatsApp threads, Facebook groups, and word-of-mouth tips. There's no central place to see what's fresh, what's certified, or what's available this week. We wanted to build the "Airbnb for local farms" — a single app where customers can find produce, book a slaughter appointment, or sign up for a farm tour, while farmers get real tools to manage inventory and bookings instead of juggling DMs. The idea also grew out of a very specific pain point: during Eid al-Adha, farms get flooded with slaughter requests through informal channels, and there was no good way to manage that rush. We wanted to fix that too.

What it does

FarmConnect is a React Native app (iOS, Android, and Web) with two sides:

For customers: Browse a home feed of local farms (Airbnb/UberEats-style cards) with ratings and certification badges like Halal Certified, Grass-Fed, or Organic. See what's on sale in a "What's New" carousel, find farms near you on a map, and visit a farm's profile to shop produce and meats, book a slaughter appointment (with a split feature so a group can share the cost and yield of a whole animal), or reserve a farm activity like a petting zoo or fruit-picking session.

For farmers: Create a profile, categorize your farm type, upload certifications, list produce/meats/activities with flexible pricing (per lb/kg or per item) and stock tracking, and manage a booking dashboard for appointments and activities.

Special feature — Eid al-Adha mode: A dedicated ticketing system for the seasonal slaughter rush, allowing customers to pre-register and farmers to assign specific dates/time slots, instead of manually triaging a flood of requests.

How we built it

Frontend: We used React Native, Expo and Hero-UI Native for styling Backend: We used Supabase for the database, file storage buckets, and authentication.

React Native is a framework for building cross-platform applications on Android, iOS and the Web from a single codebase.

Challenges we ran into

Designing a data model flexible enough to handle three very different offering types (produce, meats, activities) plus bookings, without the schema becoming unwieldy.
Building the "split booking" feature for slaughter appointments, since it required tracking multiple invitees, partial payments, and shared inventory in a way our initial schema didn't support.
Uploading images through the Supabase storage bucket
Configuring Clerk with Supabase

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Designing a booking system that supports both simple purchases and complex group-split slaughter bookings.
A clean, intuitive UI that borrows familiar patterns (Airbnb-style cards, map view) so it feels immediately usable.

What we learned

How to model marketplace-style two-sided apps (customers vs. vendors) with Supabase. The complexity of building "shared" transactions (like split slaughter bookings) versus simple one-buyer purchases.
The value of designing for a specific cultural/religious use case (Eid al-Adha) rather than only generic e-commerce flows — niche features can be a big differentiator.

What's next for FarmConnect

Payment processing and in-app checkout for produce, meats, and bookings.
Push notifications for booking confirmations, restock alerts, and Eid al-Adha date assignments.
Reviews and ratings system for farms.
Delivery/pickup logistics options.
Getting actual farmers on the app
Improving the booking system
Deploying the app on iOS, Android and Web