FarmVis

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.

Open web app Video Submission

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).