Farmtopia

A spicy social media site for farmers.

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About Farmtopia

One person alone cannot tackle these big environmental issues, but if united, people learn from each other's expertise to come up with a solution. That's what Farmtopia is about: uniting people, Farmers, and Experts all around the US, giving them a platform to share their experiences, feelings, harship, pieces of advice, etc. Conversations among users can help them cope with loneliness, natural disasters, financial downfalls, and so on.

More than a social media site, it's a mean for farmers to expand their communities beyond their farms.

Inspiration

We were inspired by Philly Codefest 2020's theme of the Environment. As we all can see, the environmental issues we're facing are increasing, and they have heavy impacts on our life. We entered this hackathon wanting to contribute our efforts to combat current problems as well as improve our skills as junior developers. We decided to tackle agricultural issues, specifically agricultural runoff. Though after our research, we haven't found an ultimate solution to runoff, we realize that solving this requires great team efforts, and currently, there seems to be a lack of connection and leadership among farmers and environmental scientists. Therefore, we decided to create a platform for farmers and experts to connect and, together, create plans to solve agriculture runoff as well as other agricultural problems. And that's how we come up with Farmtopia.

Building Farmtopia

We spent the first couple of weeks brainstorming ideas, and once we had it, we tried to define the basic features of Farmtopia. Once that was done, we created a GitHub repo, and use the Jira Kanban board to track people's progress. Besides, we had a weekly meeting on Sunday to discuss what each of us had done the week before. We built the application as we learned new technologies.

Challenges and What we've learnt

It was a challenge for us to being on progress as some of us are working (co-op), and the others are taking classes, which are equally as intense. There were weeks we were on the plateau, and we barely made any progress. However, we just reminded ourselves that we joined this hackathon to look for learning opportunities. Indeed, as we built this application, we not only polish our dev skills (understanding Flutter, Firebase, NodeJS, etc) but also our time management and teamwork.

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