How to Grow Better

Inspiration

People have become increasingly detached from food and how it's grown. Growing has become industrialised leading to increased use in harmful pesticides, fertilisers with intensive methods leading to lower quality food. Travel from field to table has an environmental impact with transport and storage contributing to increased energy usage. Economic factors also play a role with £13 billion of food being wasted by consumers and more being wasted in the food supply chain.

What it does

Collects data about the growing environment. Provides feedback to growers to enable learning.

How we built it

Sodaq ExpLoRer board using the LoRa wan network sends data to The Things Network. This feed is sent to Microshare. The data is then accessed by a custom built Azure web application which extracts relevant data for retrieval by a custom build smartphone application.

Challenges we ran into

Connecting the different platforms to each other. Learning new technologies quickly. Deciding upon relevant skills and the best roles for each team member.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Building a productive team of four people who had not previously worked together.

What we learned

Limited time drives focussed activity.

What's next for How to Grow Better

Take the idea forward to develop a product for a trial. Bill of materials costing and custom hardware specification to enable lower cost of entry. Additional sensors to provide data about nutrient levels, growth rates, insect and pest activity. Connecting with local community projects and swap meets to allow them to promote their events and projects via the platform.