Farmshare App

Inspiration

I recently joined a weekly farmshare to get local produce, and its easily one of the best decisions I have made. Not only does it gives me access to high quality fruits and vegetables, but it supports local farmers. I love supporting the small businesses in my community rather than commercial agriculture. Additionally the environmental impacts of eating local should not be overlooked. But unfortunately, participating in farmshares is still not mainstream. This inspired me to create an application that has the ability to bring farmshares to communities more widely while reducing the cost. This is done through employer subsidy as an employee benefit.

What it does

This application creates a marketplace between farms (who offer farmshares), consumers (who subscribe to weekly deliveries of the farmshares), and employers (who subsidize the price of the farmshare subscription for its employees i.e. consumers). The platform will be designed to handle the administration of enrollments, payments, and crop delivery to pick-up locations.

How we built it

I built my application frontend using React functional components and leveraging the React Kendo library for most UI components on the page. I also utilized the styled-components library for additional custom styling. The backend uses a Postgres database and Directus headless CMS to manage auth, user administration, and data collections.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge building this application was setting up my data model. There are many different user workflows to consider in this platform, and I struggled to nail down a model that addressed all application requirements.

What we learned

This was an interesting project to design a web platform that has three different user groups—farmers, consumers, and employers. As part of the design for the application, I learned the importance of structuring a data model and considering user workflows for each of those specific groups.

What's next for Farmshare App

There are a few user workflows that were left out of the application due to time constraints for this Hackathon. Next steps include adding payment processing, configuring a farmer facing portal, and completing the tracking of weekly deliveries.

Built With

• directus
• express.js
• postgresql
• react