FarmInsights

Provide farmers with insights about their farm

How it works

Farminsights is a lite application for farmers, consumers and reseachers, so they can use it to analyse the food supply coming from which states and understand the economics of consumer demand. With FarmInsights, they can know how yields have changed over time and this allow them to predict the future crops and prepare for it. Similarly, they can know what is growing well in their area and what isn’t.

Features

Dashboard

Please allow your GPS for FarmInsights. In dashboard, it provides user to the current weather in your area. Also, it will provide you useful forecast data within 24-hours such as precipitation, wind speed and temperature for your area. Additionally, users can also see the temperature pattern within 48-hours for their area.

Source: Weather forecast data from Forecast.io

Harvest Analyzer

In this analyzer, farmers can know how yields have changed over time so they can prepare for and predict future crops. They need to know what is growing well in their area and what isn’t.

Source: NASS (Quickstats): Commodity > Category: “Area Harvested"

Economics Analyzer

In this analyzer, farmers can analyse the economics of consumer demand for crops and animals & products.

Source: NASS (Quickstats): Commodity > Category: “Sales"

Food Analyzer

In this analyzer, farmers can analyse the food of consumer demand for crops and animals & products.

Source: NASS (Quickstats): Commodity > Category: “Production"

How FarmInsights is built

FarmInsights is built using an open-source Javascript web application framework called Meteor. To built this application, FarmInsights was built using the packages and plugins as following: meteor-base, mobile-experience, mongo, blaze-html-templates, session, jquery, tracker, standard-minifiers, es5-shim, ecmascript, iron:router, twbs:bootstrap, http, fortawesome:fontawesome, mdg:geolocation, accounts-password, useraccounts:bootstrap, useraccounts:iron-routing, manuelschoebel:ms-seo, check, zimme:active-route, russ:weather-icons, momentjs:moment, flot, jqvmap, morrisjs, raphael and jquery-steps.

Open Source Application

This application is open source and link to this GitHub repo is embedded in "Try it out" section below.

Challenges I ran into

As an amateur for handling such big data of records, roughly 1,000~100,000 of records per commodity (barley, corn, wheat, etc…). Most often times, I get to crash my web app during fetching the big data from USDA datasets. So, to reduce this problem and focus on becoming lite as much as possible, I carefully picked the data for use in each analyzer. Thus, not all commodity covered in my lite application.

For Testing Purpose,

Feel free to use FarmInsights, which user can experience what FarmInsights can offer. You can use the account below or create a new account. (no email required!)