Covid 19 took a big toll in family farming. Due to sanitary measures, most of those farmers can't sell their products in street markets or wet shops anymore, virtually cutting all of their selling channels and forcing them to sell to large distributors, who send those products around the world. Long distance transport of fruits and vegetables was already problematic due to the high carbon footprint, but has become even more problematic due to the pandemic for sanitary reasons, being an important hub for the spreading of the virus. Raízes proposes a sustainable service to distribute those products locally and safely, working in a similar fashion to the traditional street markets, but remotely, and also promoting awareness of the product trajectory from the farm to the consumer's fridge. Beyond that, Raizes also uses NASA's satellite, country census and big data to help the farmer identify market and climate trends, deciding which crops to plant, how much and when.
The choice of the challenge was inspired both by the interest of the team in topics related to green and distributed economy and annedotic situations that happened to some of the team members related to food distribution during the pandemic. We used NASA datasets on food security, crop global trends and JAXA satelite weater reports to define the scope of the project, and where to apply this data in the future solution. The project was done remotely using Discord, Google Meet for reunions and MIRO for service design dynamics. The final platform Mockup was developed in Adobe Illustrator and Adobe XD. The biggest problem was doing online brainstorming sessions and the biggest achievement was the rapid prototyping and testing of the solution, which took only 4 hours.