Growcery addresses the "Food for Thought" challenge by tackling the inherent singular points of failure within a globalized and centralized food production and distribution system. All it takes is a full border closure and countries that import most of their food see shortages that disrupt people's ability to feed themselves. While the current globalized systems provide benefits to the cost and distribution of food due to economies of scale, the system is not anti-fragile and any crisis event can send supply chains reeling. For example, during the COVID-19 crisis, the global supply chain has created shocks in prices and supply across the world. If the distribution and production of food are decentralized, shocks to the global system don't have to fully affect localized prices and supply if local cities and communities supplement the traditional food system with local produce and farming. In cities, even a local garden can decentralize the supply chain in food deserts and get communities involved in farming. Food shouldn't rely solely on big agricultural companies to get things to consumers. Growcery addresses these global issues by not only providing an efficient exchange for local producers but also provides incentives for more people to become growers and producers and participate in their local food system.
We were inspired as a team to choose this "Food for Thought" challenge because of the problems we saw within our own communities and cities to the COVID-19 crisis and the food supply chain: long lines, majorly increased prices, and increased food insecurity for millions of people across the US and the Globe. So when we chose to focus on "Food for Thought" we knew that it was going to center around supply chains and the food system, but eventually landed on a decentralized approach to combating the food insecurity and supply issues that faced the US and other nations due to trade and travel restriction. Thus focusing on community and local growing helps to alleviate global and centralized system shocks by putting the seeds and the food in the hands of local communities rather than disparate agro-businesses.
The space agency data we used focused around NASA Meteorological datasets from the HI-SEAS weather station from four months (September through December 2016) between Mission IV and Mission V. This data showed that the world is rapidly getting warmer and climate shifts have been impacting the planet, and we wanted to investigate the increasing and shifting solar radiation level in various regions on Earth. We integrated this to use this climate and radiation data to extrapolate to how it would affect trying to grow plants and how the increase in solar radiation affects plant growth in the long term. As our app depends on the ability to grow plants and farming this data allows us to see solar radiation patterns and possible changes in climate or radiation levels that may affect growing season and patterns.
We primarily used Android Studio, Python Jupyter notebooks with pandas, and Tableau for data visualization to both analyze data and mock-up our application design and UI/UX functionality. During this process we had problems finding relevant data to our specific problem, secondly, dataset formats on some of the coalition space agency sites were obscure or images collections, so looking for data to support our solutions was difficult in such a short amount of time. However, I think some of our greatest achievements were finding out the intricacies of the app and the ways that it could actually scale and be possible in the real-world. We even thought of options for a sustainable business model that is could possibly scale up well. On top of all this, the app and community around it could also support communities in future pandemics and crisis situations.
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1OAHO4cXcDFkXIDvcp4OQ6xmtI468rWC2yxRhL7_cOko/edit?usp=sharing