Local Farm Connector

Inspiration

Weirdly enough, all 4 of our group members attended the same high school and all took a human geography class in which our teacher encouraged us to volunteer at a local organic farm. Through volunteering at the nearby, non-GMO farm that none of us had ever heard of, we learned first-hand about how difficult it can be for local farmers with the best intentions to connect with their community

What it does

Our platform allows farmers to create an account, enter information about their farm, and register their farm for consumers to see. Meanwhile, consumers can create accounts, search for farms, get information about local farms, and see posts made my local farms.

How we built it

We implemented the backend in NodeJS and the frontend with React, using Express and Axios to help us with our apis.

Challenges we ran into

Our team consisted of two in-person hackers and two virtual hackers, which made communication somewhat difficult. On top of that, one of the group members was sick for the majority of the weekend (not in-person, don't worry) and was unable to write much code. With frequent Discord voice calls, we were still able to overcome these issues and communicate effectively. Aside from that, our experience levels varied with certain technologies, leading to some slow-downs as we all worked together to produce our project. However, this difference in experience helped the hackathon be an even better learning experience for all of us!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of how the application came together in the end. With fast-paced projects consisting of several group members, it can often be quite difficult to envision how all the moving pieces will fit together to form the finished product. However, we persisted and, working together the whole way, were able to bring all the pieces together into a website.

What we learned

Each of us learned more about the tech stack that we were working in and we gained more valuable experience with these technologies. Perhaps more importantly, we also learned how to work together as a unified team, despite not all being together in-person, to create a project that we could all be proud of. This feat took a lot of effort in communication and teamwork, which are incredibly important skills.

What's next for Local Farm Connector

In the nature of 36 hour hackathons, we were not able to implement everything that we wanted to. The main functionality that we couldn't quite finish was allowing farm accounts to actually post to their followers. Furthermore, we were really hoping to add a chat feature to the website so that potential consumers could reach out to local farmers with feedback or questions. Lastly, we also wanted to add a feature to allow users to offer to volunteer with the farms at certain available time blocks, which the farmers would be able to set. These functions would allow the Local Farm Connector to reach its true potential in connecting local, sustainable farms with consumers. If we were to continue with the project beyond that, we would add features to allow users to purchase produce from farms through our website, either for pickup or delivery. This feature would greatly help local farmers compete with large grocery chains.