Rent a Tractor

A platform for renting farming machinery to nearby farmers to reduce the barriers of entry and cost of farming

Comment

Inspiration

The average age of a farmer is 58 years old. That is not sustainable. We want to lower the barrier to entry for younger farmers, and also provide older farmers with new outlets for revenue streams. doing so will ease the necessary transition from an older to younger generation of farmers. We quickly came to realize one of the biggest barriers was the cost of machinery. Combines can cost over $500,000 which is no easy sum to pay. We thought if we could reduce the debts from purchasing this machinery, while also providing those without such equipment access, there would be great benefit to all farmers.

What it does

The tool connects those with farming machinery and those in need. An owner can set a price for usage of their equipment by the day, and users can contact them to make a deal. sharing equipment is already happening on farms, we just want to make it more transparent, and easier.

How we built it

Our web app was made with angular.js. Each page acts as a component written in html. We focused on the front-end, to create the environment our users would interact with.

Challenges we ran into

We hoped to round up some simple functionality on the back end (i.e. publishing postings, login authentication) but we did not have the time. So instead, we put all our efforts into a UI that we feel can be easily understood by the users.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Integrated google maps within Angular 7.x. This was used to visualize the locations of nearby equipment. The site is also hosted online (linked below), but we could not figure out why opening internal links returns a 404 error.

What we learned

This project taught us a lot about working in a group, which we all found valuable. Furthermore, problem solving within a group, and adapting to the necessary changes was absolutely necessary. To achieve our goals, we knew a website was what we needed. However, none of us were very experienced with Angular or similar web technologies, so we really had to learn on the fly. Although this was a challenge, we felt that's what hackathons are about!

What's next for Rent a Tractor

Building our back-end would have to be done for rent a tractor to be put up live. Our system would start as a platform for merely facilitating farmer-to-farmer deals, much like craigslist. From there, using stripe we could quickly transform into handling the deals being made through our site. The biggest advantages we see here are a simplicity and transparency with deals. Other future ideas include:

  • IoT for tracking rental property
  • handling services as well as machinery
  • encouraging farmer to farmer data transfer

We see this as a tool for reducing the costs to farmers. But we also see it as something greater: A platform to alleviate stress, and facilitate straightforward communication between rural communities. We believe in Rent a tractor.

Share this project:

Updates