Harvest Aid

Login Page
sign up page

Inspiration

When thinking of types of Natural Disasters, people always think of Earthquakes and Tsunamis and rarely do people think of drought; however, droughts have the ability to destabilize entire communities! They result in decreased water quantity and quality, an increased risk of illness or disease, higher mortality rates, and negative mental health outcomes, and more. To mitigate the negative effects of this, we decided to create a platform for farmers, and their communities, specifically. Specifically, the depletion of water availability in soils causes significant declines in crops and livestock productivity.

What it does

HarvestAid lets farmers who are affected by natural disasters connect with each other and let them have a safety net in case anything goes wrong. If a farmer has too many seeds and they are about to go bad, they can advertise the seeds, and update their profile saying what they need. This case, anyone who needs seeds and has what they need, can connect with them and form a deal. Our app also removes the need of third parties to create a supply chain and each farmer can create their own supply chain

How we built it

We started by deploying a few functionalities of our program on python, and after those functionalities were made for a good amount, we started working on the front-end using css html and backend at the same time. After having the skeleton of few pages, we decided to start working with the flask Python library and connect the two better, and finally using next.js we refurbished the front end.

Challenges we ran into

We all had very limited experience in front end development, and creating a website like this was a great challenge. We did not know how to link our python code to our html sites and create a functioning and intuitive user interface. Since our website is targeted toward farmers, it is likely that not all of them have an extensive amount of technological experience, so it was vital that this website was easy to navigate. We overcame this challenge by researching the different ways available to link our frontend and backend, as well as consulting the mentors, and we decided to go with Flask. There was definitely a learning curve that we had to overcome, but thankfully we managed to do so and make our website aesthetic and functioning!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The main accomplishment that we are proud of is being able to run a functioning html page with the backend on python. At first, we assumed it was impossible, and even though we have never done something like this, we managed to consult mentors, watch informative YouTube videos, then learn by making mistakes and trying different things. We started off simple, with basic functionalities, then proceeded to make it more advanced as we went on. Also, we’re proud that we dedicated ourselves for the entire night, and came back with full energy in the morning– despite only having less than 2 hours of sleep, and also commuting to our respective homes from Mississauga to Scarborough. This was a great challenge and we’re proud of the outcome.

What we learned

Since all of us were beginners to hackathons and team collaboration, we were all fairly knew to github. We had encountered it in the past, but only worked on already created repositories from class and never had to make our own. This led us running into many github errors such as merge conflicts, not being able to push or commit. Since we faced this so often, we all became pros at handling it!

We also learned how to link html and Flask as mentioned above. We are very overjoyed to have this experience as creating a functioning and well thought out user interface is detrimental to our success as computer scientists.

What's next for Harvest Aid

Currently, the main mode of messaging is emailing between users, so to further improve HarvestAid, we would create an in-app messaging system to further aid negotiations and communications. Furthermore, we would also add another advanced search method, so if you put in what you have, the listings of all those who need this item, will be displayed to you. That way you can see if there is anything of theirs you would like, making it a more efficient way to help out your community by trading your surplus items.