ghamzak/t9hacks

T9Hacks (Entrepreneurship Track) - Project: Farm2Table

Supporting local farms + keeping people healthy

Inspiration:

“Several animal studies indicate serious health risks associated with genetically modified (GM) food (AAEM 2009),” source including infertility, immune problems, accelerated aging, faulty insulin regulation, and changes in major organs and the gastrointestinal system. The AAEM has asked physicians to advise all patients to avoid GM foods.

Many times, we have seen people who, for various reasons, need to access local farm products, but are not able to locate the farms and/or their products. This inspired us to develop a website where farmers can register and showcase their products, and customers can find the farms close to them.

What it does:

Farmers can use it to showcase/market their products, and customers who prefer local products, but can't afford an overpriced farmer's market, can either personally drive to the nearby farms and handpick the products they need, or, in a later stage of the project, order it through this website and have it delivered to their door.

How we built it:

We used HTML/CSS/JavaScript (for the front end), PHP (for the backend), MySQL (database), Google Maps API (for showing farmer's location on the map), and Adobe Illustrator (for designing the logo).

Challenges we ran into:

We tested 3 methods for backend, including Flask, Django, and PHP, and we ended up using PHP.

Accomplishments that we're proud of:

Making it all work in less than 24 hours.

What we learned:

Brainstorming in half an hour; Team work & collaboration; Fast-paced prototyping and prototype testing;

What's next for Farm to Table:

The next steps include: 1) using Google API to calculate the distance of "current location" of the customer and local farmers, sort the results and show the N nearest local farms; 2) adding footer to the page; 3) adding "edit my profile" page for the farmers; 4) Making it accessible; 5) add capability to upload photo to the database; 6) deploy the website on an actual server;