SAPLING

Inspiration

India is the second-largest producer of horticulture in the world after China. India witnessed a record horticulture production estimated at 342.33 million tonnes in the year 2021-2022. The share of fruits and vegetable production alone was 107.24 million tones and 204.84 million tonnes respectively.

Unfortunately, India also contributes around 7% of total food wastage globally. The post-harvest losses of fruits and vegetables are estimated to be 11-26.7%. As a result, there has been a huge economic loss for farmers. While there are many reasons such as environmental factors, poor handling, lack of cold storage facilities, etc, the main reasons for these losses are transportation and distribution. Much of the earnings goes to storing and transportation, and farmers are left with little or no profit. In the worst cases, they are even facing losses. The suicide rates of farmers in India are increasing at a staggering rate of 10% every year.
To prevent such magnitude of losses and suicides, we have been trying to find a solution for this serious issue and to ensure that farmer incomes are increased.

Agri-tourism is gaining popularity these days. Present-day agri-tourism offers a real-time field experience for various purposes like education, entertainment, and financial benefits. But, we found this business to be niche because it is managed by agencies who set up farm-like environments only in few rural areas. Their sole purpose is to make money. It will not benefit all the farmers in the country. Even if farmers indulge in agri-tourism independently, a lot of money is needed to advertise and attract tourists. We wanted to take a broader perspective, where every farmer can independently generate revenue in their lands, with no fear of harvest loss. That's how we came up with the idea, SAPLING

What it does

The users are asked to sign in or login, after which they will be directed to the home page. The features of our app are: Select a crop: The users are given a list of options, in which they can choose any crop/s of their wish. The options are modeled to display the seasonal crops of that particular region.

Find the nearest farm that grows that crop: We have used map API to connect the users with the nearest farmland growing their choice of crop.

Once the user selects the crop and location, a part of the land needed to grow the selected crop is determined and the ownership is given to the user, meaning, a pre-determined percentage of the harvest from that land will directly go to the user. This percentage is specified by the user, and after the harvest, the user buys his share by paying the amount. This amount will be determined in our app, which will be in accordance with the market price. The user can also visit the farm with family and children, to take part in the agricultural process.

How we built it

We are creating a two sided networking App using Programming language: DART Database : Firestore Platform: Firebase which is a part of Google cloud platform. We are using Flutter for Front End, open-source UI software development kit.