Ripe n Reach - Space Apps Challenge

Ripe n Reach| Food for Thought

Awards & Nominations

Ripe n Reach has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!

Global Finalist

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.

World Less Hungry: Optimise farm produce to tackle food crisis.

Summary

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to wreak havoc globally, generating significant disruption to food supply chains, resulting in losses for agricultural-producers, globally. This scalable solution using NASA & user-generated data enables farmers to optimize produce-value, unemployed-manpower, and health services to improve their productivity. Diverse stakeholders may use the demand-driven data recorded as lead indicators for managing Covid19 spread while mitigating risks to the food system.

How We Addressed This Challenge

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to wreak havoc globally, generating significant disruption to food supply chains, resulting in losses for agricultural producers and price hike for consumers.

NASA research reveals that with Covid restrictions and health hazards across the world, the First Mile of food production is facing these challenges :

Food Wastage rising due to less consumption of perishables + inadequate optimization/channelization to deficient markets
Food Hoarding leading to artificial price fluctuations
Shortages of labor for on-farm production, harvesting, and primary on-farm processing
Health and productivity of agricultural production chain under threat

Adequate optimization of produce, unemployed manpower, and effective health services will be required to reinstate/ improve the situation of the farmers and arrest the current disruption in food supply chain.

This solution uses NASA and other data sources and aims at providing the farmer with a user-friendly platform to access competitive fair prices for his produce while optimizing delivery time with contact less delivery and payment. It also gives him easy access to cold storage information or even deficient market prices and capacity should he choose to sell his produce elsewhere.

The farmer will also gain easy access to emergency health care facilities and receive all COVID related precautions so that he, his family, and his staff are protected. He will also have easy access to hiring staff as required from the unemployed seasonal workforce database.

Other benefits and beneficiaries:

Demand Data collected from the app acts as lead indicators to arrest Covid19 spread and optimize emergency medical resources capacity.

Agriculture Agencies and Food Processing Unions can plan future inventory with real-time demand data.

Farmworkers Union can channelize unemployed seasonal/migrant workers to improve productivity and reduce unemployment.

With adequate usage of this platform, we expect that Food Wastage will be reduced, unemployed labor will be effectively employed and health & productivity of agricultural production will improve.

How We Developed This Project

What inspired your team to choose this challenge?

I am Supra, one of the 3 team members of Ripe n Reach. I was born in an agricultural family in a village in West Bengal, India and sometimes we went through extreme poverty even though we grew enough crops. When I was small, I once asked my grandfather, why do we go through this, and he said: "Love. For love. I love to watch and nurture the growth of plants. I love to grow food for the community. Sometimes I don’t have enough to take care of our health. But I still continue to contribute to my society, while conserving soil, water, and life. I wish I could do more with less.”

While I managed to get a job in Australia, my extended family of farmers finds sustenance really tough with Corona health hazards, Corona restrictions, and the Amphan Cyclone that struck the state on May 18th, 2020.

I was determined to find a way out for the farmers' families across the world. India is one complex terrain and the problems are unique but there are similarities across other geographies too.

What was your approach to developing this project?

We built the user story for the farmers and traced out his daily life and built acceptance criteria in the following format

As a farmer who is ready with his produce
I want to be able to easily find the nearest markets and food processing units for my perishable and non-perishable produce
So that I can avoid wastage of crops, maximize on produce selling price and find the best route to reach the market

As a team, our thoughts are the following:

Find a focussed problem area so we focussed on the first mile of the agricultural production and worked thoroughly for the largest stakeholder in the space.

The solution is capable enough to be scaled easily and across borders and geographies.

The solution/ platform is not language-dependent and can be worked across different geographies.

Data is the new oil or gold. The data we generate from the platform may be digestible by health companies, food processing, cold storage installation companies, transportation, and logistics companies to predict their next area of growth or invest in assets in these locations.

One example could be that the labor demand and Corona health emergency data will be used by government & farm employment recruiters to channelize the unemployed/ migrant/ seasonal employees to huge demand labor-intensive areas.

The data can be used to build further solutions or monetized for future business planning.

How did you use space agency data in your project?

Understand the problems and optimization areas for the "first mile of the food chain", the agricultural producers, which also ratified my insights.

We wanted to Check the Existing Global Cropland Maps: Remote Sensing and Non–Remote Sensing Approaches

We understood How to Mitigate risks to food systems during COVID-19: Reducing food loss and waste

We derived approaches from Policy responses to keep input markets flowing in times of COVID-19

We Global Food Security-support Analysis Data (GFSAD) Cropland Extent 2015 South Asia, Afghanistan, and Iran product 30 m V001

Used Earth observations and remotely sensed data from GPM (precipitation), SMAP (soil moisture), GRACE (groundwater), MODIS/VIIRS/Landsat/Sentinel (surface characterization, surface emissions), and products from GEOS-5/MERRA-2, you can assess changes in water availability (water stress), changes in agricultural food production systems, energy consumption, and other associated changes caused by the response to COVID-19.

Used Google trends to see real-time trends of what infrastructure farmers were looking for. Such as "Cold storage" grew in search demand by more than 100% from semi-rural and rural parts of India. Around May 18th onwards, "cold storage" search term demand grew by 100% in West Bengal, when Amphan cyclone struck.

What tools, coding languages, hardware, software did you use to develop your project?

Language: PHP

Framework: Laravel

Map Service: Openlayers

What problems and achievements did your team have?

Sourav & Sushmita are 2 other team members based in Kolkata, and working tirelessly with almost no internet and no electricity for most parts of the time. We were on the verge of not competing due to resource crunch but I reminded the team of what my late grandfather said. To do good with what we have.

With our intermittent electricity and internet connections, our efforts to create a video presentation failed.

We spent a lot of time in finding the right dataset. The dataset on food growth is raster data while we needed vector data. We pivoted to find a different way to arrive at the solution.

So we first started with pen and paper prototypes while I did the entire secondary research and data crunching as I had internet access.

We first worked on different ways to find secondary data that helped us in our research and that could be extrapolated for analysis.