I realize that a lot of restaurant workers have lost their jobs, and front line workers in grocery stores are battling with anxiety, I want to empower them to be open to a new mindset around food topics, from being unemployed or anxious to become local vegetable growers, to self-unionize and take back their independence and power, to build shorter supply chains between smallholder farmers to consumers, and for consumers to keep the passion alive with recipe development by cooking at home, until restaurants can fully operate again. To teach ecommerce skills to people to sell seed, fertilizers to smallholder farmers, vegetable growing kits for consumers, and to keep an open ecommerce market for fishers, farmers to sell their products, or excess food from developed country to other countries at risk such as East African countries.
To show that there is hope for them to regain employment in a new model that can be fulfilling, less anxiety from having less contact with the public, and still profitable.
To keep agricultural activities alive on the local and inter-regional level, this project will provide educational tools for deepening an understanding on environmental systems analysis in food production. Free online lectures from reputable universities will allow the user more knowledge on how much land, energy, and nutrients are needed to provide various foods. This is crucial before building into the next step of creating a positive socio-economic impact in increased local food production. More awareness on why vanilla prices are volatile and its production is labour intensive will also be covered in an attempt to raise future funding for a research greenhouse that commercially grows vanilla in the northern hemisphere.
This platform will connect interested individuals with reputable e-commerce mentors to keep an open market.
https://datalab.review.fao.org/dailyprices.html#
Spice greenhouse farmers can connect with direct potential buyers, reducing supply chain by cutting middlemen and auctions, and maintain an ethical and balanced production while improving their own quality of life.
5. Geolocation Data For Local Vegetable Growers
Users will be able to trade vegetables / food with each other
My Inspiration:
I am passionate about food, cooking and food photography. My (super) new food blog is www.citrinecuisine.com and IG @citrine.cuisine to teach people new recipes, have fun at home while being quarantined, it will also have a section that translates YouTube Indonesian vanilla farmers to English , to share their techniques with vanilla farmers in Tanzania, East Africa. This combined with my own family history inspired me to choose this challenge. (This is my first time doing NASA Space Apps, therefore a solo team). I came from an agricultural country, Indonesia. Growing up I always heard from my mom that my great grandparents owned a rice mill, a rubber plantation, and a bakery. However, due to a global event (the WW2), they were also faced with challenges regarding food security, at the time they lost their rice mill and bakery during the Japanese invasion, rice is the staple food in Indonesia so I wonder how they solved their problems during that time, their resiliency and determination to rebuild their lives from 0 in such dire circumstances inspired me to hold on to the same work ethics. Fast forward to 2020, now my generation is also facing a global challenge that affects everyone's food security from the local level to the global level, the more I learn about agriculture, the more I realize that growers and farmers have the best opportunity to be directly involved with researchers. My position now as a STEM student really pushes me to think hard on how I can use my passion for history, curiosity of learning new skills using space data to contribute to a sustainable solution towards food security.
My approach:
1. Appreciate History & Learn From Each Global Player
I was born in Indonesia but moved to Canada . Both Indonesia and Canada have a special relationship with the Dutch. The Dutch colonized Indonesia mainly for the spice trade for over 300 years, and Canadian soldiers played a major role in the liberation of the Netherlands during WW2. These mixed cultural relationships have me look up to the agricultural systems and technologies that each country has developed, I quickly found out that Wageningen University in the Netherlands is the #1 agricultural university in the world, they are such a small country but they also export the most food to other countries. Indonesia is second in vanilla production to Madagascar, their farmers are improving their techniques and they seem to be in good shape for a good harvest year 3-4 years from now (2023-2024). A research greenhouse at Wageningen University in the Netherlands has successfully grown vanilla in a controlled climate. I hope to be able to implement this in Canada, to reduce total dependency from importing from other countries and to have less price volatility if Canada can grow their own vanilla (and other spices). Vanilla is very labour intensive, now with many people losing their jobs for an uncertain period, hopefully a vanilla and spice production greenhouse will be able to give them long term employment. This will shorten the supply chain (no need for spice auctions, middlemen, and flying across the globe for quality control, import/export), it reduces carbon footprint from less traveled distance. I hope to learn from other countries such as Iceland and Finland for their greenhouse management using renewable energy and computer programs to control climate.
Webinars watched:
https://arset.gsfc.nasa.gov/water/webinars/remote-sensing-for-agriculture-20