Maize Fertilizer Calculator

Inspiration

What it does

How we built it

Challenges we ran into

Accomplishments that we're proud of## Inspiration

I studied agriculture, and I kept coming back to one practical gap: many smallholder maize farmers apply fertilizer by hand, without measuring, so it's hard to know how much a field needs or what it will cost. [One honest sentence on what you saw or read. If you have none, delete this line.]

What it does

The Maize Fertilizer Calculator turns a bottle-cap fertilizer blend into field-level numbers. A farmer, or an extension officer helping one, enters the field size, spacing, how many caps of NPK and urea go on each planting station, the weight of one level cap, and bag weights and prices. The page then shows:

• the estimated number of planting stations
• kilograms of NPK and urea, exact bags and whole bags to buy, and total cost
• nitrogen applied per hectare

Farmers can also enter their usual handful, in grams, as an unverified estimate. The tool shows both methods side by side and says which number is higher, in plain words. It never calls either one better, because there's no locally validated rate behind it. It's a calculator, not a fertilizer recommendation, and the page says so.

How I built it

I used the Devpost Learn skill pack in [GitHub Copilot in VS Code]. The AI interviewed me, then I wrote the scope, the PRD and the spec before any code. They're in the repo under devpost/. The app is a single static page with the calculation logic in its own file, and I checked it against a worked example by hand.

Challenges

• Keeping the scope small: I cut accounts, saved records and an AI guide, because they needed a connection and I couldn't verify them in time.
• Making the comparison honest: the handful is unverified, so the tool states differences without implying a verdict.
• Some of the features i added were postponed to future updates

What I learned

-Planning first stopped me building features I couldn't finish. -My first instinct was to keep adding features, and I pushed the AI for accounts, saved records and a guide. The planning documents kept deferring them to a later release. I learned that a smaller tool I can finish and test beats a bigger one I can’t verify.

What's next

Test it with real farmers and an extension officer, add locally validated guidance, and consider more crops. Records and a text guide exist on a separate branch but are not part of this submission.

What's next for Maize Fertilizer Calculator

• Test with farmers and extension officers to check whether the cap-based measure is usable in the field, and whether the handful comparison helps or confuses.
• Add locally validated guidance, working with extension officers, so the tool can show a cited reference range next to the farmer's own numbers. Today it deliberately makes no recommendation, because I don't have a trusted local rate source.
• More crops, each with its own outputs. The nitrogen-per-hectare headline suits maize, and other crops would need different measures.
• Saved records and a text guide. I built early versions on a separate branch, but they aren't verified or part of this submission.

Built With

• copilot
• css
• github
• html
• javascript
• node.js
• vite