SMS Farmer

We provide rural farmers access to vital information, such as weather advisories, via SMS Messaging.

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Inspiration

  • Discovery of the statistic that people who live in rural areas tend to have less access to the internet
  • Partly inspired by an SMS chore scheduling tool created by Annika and Sam.
  • The story of bringing Uber to SMS messaging for those who have no access to smartphones.

What it does

  • Offers various subscription services providing farmers with relevant information
  • Checks the status of drought conditions in the area
  • Provides users with a daily update for the weather forecast

How we built it

  • We started by building an application that could send and receive SMS messages using Twilio.
  • Firebase was then used to setup a database to store vital user information such as location
  • Various weather API's were used to retrieve relevant weather information such as drought status and weather advisories

Challenges we ran into

  • We ran into problems with finding APIs that contained agricultural data. We decided to just stick with weather APIs and demo the app with some mock data in addition to the API.
  • We also had trouble setting up the database at first, but we got it working once we started working with Firebase.
  • Figuring out what information was relevant for farmers and how to display the data in a clear and concise matter.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Usage of Twilio Library in Python to reply to incoming SMS messages with relevant data
  • Our Agro server using Flask that is used for receiving SMS messages
  • Retrieval of information from various weather API's and converting to a text-message friendly format

What we learned

  • We learned how to implement an SMS messaging service with Twilio.
  • Integrating information from REST APIs to provide a user friendly mode of access
  • Using Firebase to organize and manage user data for future reference

What's next for SMS Farmer

  • We would like to incorporate accurate predictive modeling, and develop a crowd sourced API for relevant information to be spread more easily. We hope that eventually, farmers can input information local to other farmers.
  • Expansion of SMS coverage internationally, as lack of broadband access may be more prevalent in other countries.
  • Additional services, such as pricing estimates and communication between farmers the status of their shipments
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