SeedWise

Building personalized plant profiles for home and community gardeners to give them targeted farming advice and connect them with local supply retailers.

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The Problem...

"In California, 80 percent of the population lives in cities. Feeding the cities of the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area, with a total population of some 7 million involves importing 2.5 to 3 million tons of food per day over an average distance of 500 to 1,000 miles.

This system requires enormous amounts of energy and generates significant greenhouse gas emissions. It also is extremely vulnerable to large-scale disruptions, such as major earthquakes" (Altien, 2019).

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Furthermore, access to food also fails to reach "1 of every 8 people" who live under the poverty line: "mostly senior citizens, children and minorities" (Altien, 2019). But this issue is not just limited to California--it is a problem in many parts of American and across the world.

The Solution: Urban Farming, but make it sustainable

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One way to offset our food security problem as well as the large amount of carbon emissions created during commercial food production is to develop a culture of local, small-scale, urban agriculture. But growing ill-suited plants for your garden can be more wasteful than helpful and importing tools/supplies from afar can also introduce needless carbon emissions into the process.

Enter SeedWise, an all new app for guiding gardeners in making sustainable choices along their journey towards growing a thriving local garden.

What it does

SeedWise gets specific environment conditions, the location, and personal commitment level of the user. From its expert database it offers a list of roots, vegetables, and fruits that is best fit the users conditions and desires. From here the user is able to customize which plants they want, and it adds these plants to their profile.

After creating a profile, the user can now view their plant dashboard where they can get detailed instructions on how to sustainably plant, grow, fertilize, and harvest healthy produce. We developed an algorithm for mapping user parameters to a unique string that corresponds to matching lists of crops in our database

What More?

In the future, SeedWise would be able to create an interactive timeline for each plant's growth, allowing users to upload pictures for an AI algorithm to determine to health of their plants and get weekly updates about how their plants should be growing along with age-specific advice. For example, during the weeks of maturity for pumpkins, users would be prompted with a guide about checking for squash vine borers-- a common pest. Last, alongside this whole process, SeedWise could generate a personalized subscription based garden supply order that only had tools, supplies, and fertilizers useful for the plants a user was growing. These supplies would come from an ever-growing database of local suppliers to reduce the carbon emissions related with shipping these products long distances.

How we built it

Our app is built using Swift for the front end, which communicates with our Firebase database. While the app is only native to IOS, we plan on expanding its availability to all platforms in the future.

Challenges we ran into

Working with completely new technology, we definitely had a learning curve we had to climb: our database in specific was a source of a lot of head-scratching throughout our development process. Between forgetting to change read/write privileges and having to redo the structure of our collections, we spent a lot of time debugging our database.

What we learned

On the other hand, working through this learning curve taught us a lot about how databases work with the front end as well as how to organize an efficient database. Learning new technology in such a short time has given us the confidence to tackle larger problems for our project moving forward.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

For working together as a team for the first time, we are very proud of our cohesion and chemistry which enabled us to flesh out and develop a working app in such a short time!

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