FarmCast

Inspiration

Your weather app thinks you're trying to decide whether to bring a jacket. But you're trying to decide whether to plant $80,000 worth of corn. There's a gap there, and we wanted to fix it.

What it does

FarmCast is the weather app that actually gets it. Real frost warnings before your tomatoes die overnight. Spray windows so you're not wasting product in the wind. Planting timelines based on your actual location and your actual crop. It pulls live 7-day forecasts from NOAA's Weather API and runs them through a Growing Degree Day engine to calculate crop-specific maturity timelines in real time. Set your location, pick your crop, and the app gives you: a dynamic days-to-harvest counter that updates with actual temperature data, frost warnings with estimated dollar loss based on your acreage, spray windows calculated from wind speed and precipitation probability, disease pressure scores derived from live humidity readings, and planting window recommendations cross-referenced against USDA regional crop calendars. Every screen, the farm world view, 7-day forecast grid, and alerts board, reflects your real conditions. It's built for the 2 million small farms, and even gardeners, currently making big decisions with the same app everyone uses to check if they need an umbrella.

How we built it

React, TypeScript, NOAA's weather API, USDA crop data, Supabase, and a Growing Degree Day engine that calculates harvest timelines from real temperatures instead of just counting days on a calendar. Basically we made weather data go to agriculture school.

Challenges we ran into

NOAA's raw data comes in a format so chaotic it made us question our life choices. Also: making genuinely complex agricultural science feel simple enough that a farmer checking their phone at 5am actually understands it. That one kept us up.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Every single number in the app is live. Real weather, real location, real crop math. Nothing is fake, nothing is hardcoded. When it says frost risk is high tonight, it means it.