I was discussing impact of technology on the agriculture industry with my cousin (who has lived in rural India and has been involved in the agriculture sector in the past) some time ago when I realised that not a lot of development is being done in that sector. That was the moment when I started thinking about ideas that could potentially be applied in order to improve lives of farmers and quality of their produce. I couldn't find a lot of work currently being done which motivated me to take some action. I have also recently met some people who are interested in having a small backyard garden of their own but none of them have any clue where to start. Of course the internet could be of help here but tracking progress is still a challenge.
The project that is being presented is a small part of the overall idea. Within the scope of this Hackathon project, the main target user is an urban farmer. The main idea is to provide them with a device that they can plant within their fields. They also have access to a mobile app and a website. Using these, they can register and login into their account. Once registered, a farmer can create fields, specifying which crops are being produced. The device that they buy can be assigned to one such field by providing it's unique ID number. It currently collects information like temperature and light. It connects to local wifi (having a sim card is future) using which it reports vital information under it's own unique ID to a main server. Using the information generated by this basic application, new inexperienced farmers can quickly know what is lacking in their crop while professional farmers can refine their techniques. The web application also knows baselines for different crops using which it can compare how a particular farmer's crops are doing and send appropriate notifications when required.
The future of this app is quite wide. The goal for the near future is to create a global network of farmers that can operate on cellular and data networks. The device that collects the information can be expanded in terms of it's sensor count to include a crop density sensor and a humidity sensor.
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