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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

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).