Agrivengers - Space Apps Challenge

Agrivengers| Food for Thought

Food for Thought

Your challenge is to consider the journey of food to your plate, determine how disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic are affecting the food supply locally and globally, and propose solutions to address these issues.

Carabao

Summary

Our application, Carabao, is meant to help promote the government-endorsed home and urban gardening by giving city-dwellers an easily accessible database for all their plant-growing needs, including environmental data and statistics to aid the plant’s progress. Using the information gathered from NASA's Landsat and NASAAccess, JAXA’s JASMIN; ESA’s Sentinel- 1, Sentinel -2, and PROBA - V; and CSA's RADARSTAT - 2, SMAP, and Annual Crop database, a location-based crop prediction and tips are formulated as a main feature of the application. In addition, our application includes a farm-to-home delivery and consultation to experts by giving tips which provides a source of income to local farmers.

How We Addressed This Challenge

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, both local and global food chains have been disrupted. In our country the Philippines, the effects of the COVID-19 and its countermeasures, such as travel restrictions, have created bottleneck distribution problems leaving poorer communities vulnerable to food shortages as well as putting many produce farmers in massive debt and wage cuts. As the Philippines transitions out of quarantine, many experts such as Agriculture Secretary William Dar and other officials of the Department of Agriculture (DA) have given their support to urban farming as a means of better food security and social distance precaution in a post-COVID-19 world. This also falls in line with the FAO’s brief, “Urban food systems and COVID-19: The role of cities and local governments in responding to the emergency,” in which the FAO urges governments to “[promote] short supply chains (buying from closer sources) and strengthening rural urban linkages to adequately support food systems.” Thus, it is with this information in mind that our project aims to support urban agriculture, home gardening, and local farms by connecting all three groups via our application, Carabao.

How We Developed This Project

Our team was inspired to choose the challenge, “Food for Thought”, because the food industry is greatly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic throughout the world. In our country, there was a shortage in food supplies, lack of public transportation, inefficient food distribution to the local communities and poor access to safe food. We also found out that many people are struggling in growing their own food in the garden especially in the urban areas. Our country is located near the equator which makes us experience extreme weather conditions. Aside from this, our geographical location allows us to have a lot of tropical cyclones and typhoons. As an agricultural country, we highly depend on crops for our economic development. Due to this we thought of a solution that will be helpful not only during the current situation but also after the pandemic.

The tools that we used for this project are:

Framer - it was used to develop the prototype of the application
Adobe Illustrator - it was used to create vectors and logo for the application
Adobe Photoshop - it was used to create a GIF version of the prototype for the presentation
G Suite - We made use of Google Drive to compile our resources and references. We also used Google Docs and Google Slides.
Facebook Messenger and Rocketchat - it was used by the team members for communication.
Unsplash - we used this opensource website to get images which were used in the application.

The space agency data will be used to execute the features in the application which includes a plant prediction tool that provides a list of plants that are suited best to the location of the user based on space-based data provided by NASA, ESA, JAXA and CSA. This datasets includes the all-day weather monitoring, soil moisture, crop yield and vegetation cover, identification of crop species (PROBA-V), water irrigation of specific crops and more. These data are commonly used as an aid to farming in rural areas but not in urban areas. By integrating both urban growth data and agricultural data, urban gardening can be improved not only by predicting the best plant to grow in a certain location but also adapting to the best cultivation practice.

Due to the lack of technical expertise of the team members and time, we could not fully develop the application. Our team is composed of undergraduate students who are mostly not from the science and technology field which made it difficult for us to understand the given datasets and resources that were provided. The main achievement that we had was to be able to collaborate as we were all coming from different fields to develop an idea and solution to address the current situation. We also managed to connect with a team member who lives on the opposite side of the world in Canada which allowed us to have a different perspective in the food and agricultural industry. It also gave us an opportunity to discover different resources which we might use in our own field in the future. If we were given more time, the actual implementation of the project or application can be made.

Future recommendations:

To create an Augmented reality of a virtual garden
To use Deep learning by using image recognition in identifying the plant species
Promotion of vertical farming (including aeroponics and hydroponics) for limited spaces and places with extreme weather
To provide GMO classes for urban gardening and a how-to guide to genetically modify your own plants for maximum yield