Urban Farmer dApp

While we were not successful in Fund 7, we have returned to Fund 8 with an updated plan. During the waiting time, our primary developer has committed resources to completing the back end and we will have MVP functionality of the back end systems prior to the completion of Fund 8. Interested parties may contact the team for a demonstration.

Functionality

App to provide system construction information.
App to provide growing instructions for specific crops, tailored to size of space available.
App to provide an API to collect data from environmental systems and IOT sensors.
App to provide an API to collect harvest data.
App to provide an ML and Human support interface to suggest improvements from environmentals and sensors to improve harvests.
App to provide a community interface that allows nearby purchasers to find active urban farms in their area and place orders for produce.
App to provide full food traceability on block chain, automatically.
App to facilitate payments with Stripe and ADAPay between purchaser and farm to support fiat on ramp, as well as for farm to pay for subscription to services through either ADA or Fiat.
App to provide dispatch services to equipment owners who need on site technical help.

Demographics

Primary users are small urban farm operators that have or wish to build 10,000 square feet or less of urban, vertical farm to feed their local community within a 20 mile radius of their location.

Action Plan

We are currently developing the wireframe UI/UX for the application itself, based upon deep industry knowledge and the expected feature list that is outlined above.

We are currently developing the minimum viable product back ends to handle dispatch and to manage crop rotations.

We will utilize our local college school of design to help us implement our UX/UI. This is an ongoing partnership at our university, and several institutions in our area have successfully utilized this service. The funds requested from this catalyst round will go directly to paying the participating students for their time in developing the UX/UI with our guidance.

We will build the code necessary to generate an NFT which contains all food traceability requirements on testnet, and integrate it into our app.

We will build the code necessary to query the testnet blockchain to display food traceability standards. The second portion of the funds requested will go to pay the developer's time to build these tools.

Future action plan items beyond this point will require additional funding from future catalyst rounds, or other means.

We will open the beta version of the app to the first ten names on our waitlist. If necessary, we will continue to move down the waitlist until we have 10 active farms. We will add up to 5 additional farms each month until side chain releases.

We will monitor for Basho releases, and begin experimenting in testnet for modifying our code to utilize a native token and side chaining to build our layer 2 chain.

We will release the app to the remainder of the waitlist after sufficient testing on layer 2.

We will seek certification of the app at the highest possible level according to IOG standards.

We will build the DAO and transfer assets to it.

Roadmap and Milestones

Wire Frame for application flow will be completed by End of Month May 2022.
UX design will be completed by End of Month June 2022.
UX design will be coded into app by End of Month July 2022.
Implementation of Harvest data as NFT for traceability will be coded into app by End of Month July 2022 and testnet NFTs will be created from live harvest data in our reference farm.

Key Performance Indicators

By End of Month October 2022 We intend to have at least 10 small farms in different regions utilizing the dApp for management of their farms. These initial test users will allow us to further refine the systems experience and tweak the ML algorithms.

By End of Year 2022 we intend to have our native token RESI accepted by the dApp and our stake pool systems operational, with dependency on side pool functionality being available to mainnet. We expect to grow by 5 new farms per month between July and end of year, controlling access to the system via a waiting list until side pools can be properly deployed and our paradigm tested in that environment.

By End of Year 2023 we intend to move the source code of the system and management responsibility of the system into a DAO and allow the community to drive the future of the system via democratic action.

Skills Required

We have identified the following technical skills as necessary to the successful development and deployment of our dApp:

Adobe XD Operation
.NET Programming
Bootstrap 5
Python Programming
Plutus Programming
Stakepool Operation
Cardano API access (Phyrhose License Approved)
IoT Management
Data Warehousing Operation
Serverless Infrastructure Management
AWS Lambda
AWS SageMaker Operation
AWS Infrastructure Management

We believe that with over 25 years of IT management from one co-founder, and the entrepreneurship degree and retail management experience of the other co-founder, that we have sufficient business knowledge to successfully operate and hire the remaining development team that we will need as we scale up. We believe that our core developer who has over 30 years of business programming in his portfolio adds another important element of success to the team.

We acknowledge that AWS infrastructure does not suffice for true decentralization, and look forward to a future where we can access more decentralized tools that replace the current functionality available at AWS. Our goal will remain that we will decentralize components at the earliest opportunity to do so.

Key Staff

Melannie Duhon CEO: <https://www.linkedin.com/in/melannie-duhon>

Extensive retail management experience. Entrepreneurship degree with Agribusiness minor from FGCU. Owner/Operator of Living Greens Urban Farm

Eric Montgomery Senior Programmer: <https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric996/>

Full stack developer with over 30 years of experience building business applications at institutional levels.

Lloyd Duhon Systems Architect: <https://www.linkedin.com/in/lloyd-duhon>

25 Year IT veteran, CTO experience. Cardano Plutus Pioneer 2nd Cohort.

Budget Breakdown

Initial funding will go towards UX design, Additional Back end development and block chain recording of data.

UX Design: $4,800 2 FGCU Intern Designers @ $15 per hour for 4 Weeks.
Back end Coding: $5200 5 Weeks for our Full Stack Developer
Plutus Coding: $5000 3 Weeks for our Plutus Developer

Acquired Funding

The team has already acquired $6000 in AWS credits to support development over the next two years.
The team has acquired a grant from FGCU for $3800 to purchase water automation equipment.
The team has acquired a grant from Cardano Proxies for 350 ADA to purchase IoT automation equipment.

This dApp will create a substantial use case for the Cardano ecosystem from a new source of potential end users. This project meets the potential directions of the challenge KPIs by integrating an existing product class (farm management tools) with the power of smart contracts (a smart contract which manages food traceability standards).

Full deployment of this dApp requires side chain capabilities with Cardano. We list this as a prerequisite to a successful deployment. If this is delayed, we will be delayed as well.

Another challenge is adoption for small farmers. We may need to localize our tool to a wide variety of languages to gain widespread adoption.

Marketing to small farmers is a necessary requirement. This team is active with social media groups that are related to Urban farming, and will need to be even more active in this area to spread awareness of the product and continue to build the waitlist.

Regulatory changes for agriculture also present risks for continuing operation.

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bookmarked!