OrganicBlock

Firebase

Inspiration

In order to feed today's global population, we currently need farmland equivalent to the size of South America. Despite the exorbitant amount of land already allocated to agriculture, an estimated 815 million people worldwide still go to bed hungry each night. Moreover, the worldwide population is estimated to be 9 billion by the end of 2050. Modern-day cities in the world already contain half of the world's population, which follows that the impact of the projected surge in global population will drastically decrease the amount of habitable land to extreme levels in order to maintain modern infrastructure. Currently, there is no incentive for Urban Population to adopt agriculture.

Also because of the COVID 19 travel restrictions cities are on the verge of a breakdown because of the shortage of food resources as the supplies form outside areas have reduced drastically.

What it does

The Organic-Block is a decentralized urban agricultural platform where people could rent vacant spaces such as backyards, rooftops or basements to produce crops using vertical farming methods. Our application incentives the urban population to farm by giving them a designated marketplace to sell their new product to consumers in their areas. We also provide our low-cost modern IoT equipment and service for vertical farming techniques.

We are very focused on the impact factor and our product meets the following UN Development Goals:

UN Sustainable Development Goals

Goal 2: End Hunger
Goal 11: Sustainable cities and communities
Goal 15: Reduction in forest loss and land degradation
Goal 13: Climate Action
Goal 12: Sustainable production pattern

How we built it

We analyzed a lot of issues regarding renting guidelines and also the authenticity of crops. As the crops in the market place are grown through our platform, this can ensure the authenticity of every product with the help of the underlying Blockchain Architecture. Also, crypto-based payments can potentially give profits for both parties. Our project is an android application and the web interface is made of Vue.js. We have built our Blockchain Architecture over Fortmatics Plasma Framework. The documentation is encrypted by using the Blockstack Encryption framework. This was primarily to scale our applications for the Indian markets and traffic. We also integrated crypto-based payments from Metamask.

Challenges we ran into

The most important challenge was to work online and understanding team dynamics while we are away is a tough job. We had to work on google meet and GitHub in order to share our ideas. It was a bit difficult in the beginning but we eventually adapted and completed the project. Integrating the Fortmatic payments into the dapp was also challenging and we had to work for it. The UI was critical as we had to make a UI for both marketplace and farming platform. So we made it very carefully so that it causes less confusion for the end-user.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have made an end to end functional application for the project and also a web interface. We also integrated the crypto payments mechanism and we used IPFS for our decentralized storage mechanism.

What's next for OrganicBlock

The vision of Organic Block is to incorporate technologies such as the automated artificial environment for plant growth. This can give a complete analysis of the farm conditions to the owner and buyer. Also improving the IoT hardware to make it comparable with multiple types of lands and climate. We plan to start a venture by designing our prototype into an end product with a much better and interactive UI, app under-development.

Check out our webpage to download the app!