Farm Vis

FarmVis was a farm management application submitted for the USDA innovation challenge. It aggregated data from the USDA and numerous other sources to provide actionable information and hopefully create a a sustainable U.S. food system during a time of climate change and extreme weather patterns. While the submission didn't receive an award, it was a great learning experience and the top projects were great.

Final Submission

This was the submission video that shows a demo of the general application.

Intermediate Submission (1.0.3)

This was an in-progress video that showed more of the application like the mixture between maps and charts.

Project Goals

FarmVis seeks to answer the following questions:

What is the food supply from farms and ranches?
Which crops are the greatest in demand?
How have yields changed over time?
What are future crop yields?
What crops are growing well and what aren't?

References

Agtech Work
USDA Innovation Challenge
USDA Today Technology is king down on the farm
CFRA: number of entry-level farmers has fallen 30% since 1987
TechCrunch article about hackathon

Lessons Learned

For future online hackathons, I'll likely start my project earlier (starting one month before the deadline for a year long hackathon probably was too ambitious to do alone), recruit help (having a designer or another developer on the team would've helped a lot), and focus more on user problems ( knew little about farmer issues as while FarmVis solved challenging technical problems it wasn't directly solving user issues).