The global pandemic raised awareness on the importance of small, local businesses and many people were looking for ways to support those in their area.
One example would be farms that sell their produce regionally.
Additionally, farmers markets in many areas were closed due to the pandemic, or less people were able to visit the potentially crowded markets.
This means that both long-term customers from the farmer's market as well as people who newly discovered their love for locally grown produce are in need of a way to connect with farms in their region.
With our webapp, we enable customers to discover and contact local produce selling farms directly. By that, we promote regional and therefore more sustainable shopping opportunities.
This “no intermediaries” approach assures that the farmers get paid adequately for their produce and therefore supports local businesses. This also lowers the price for the customer.
Our project also encourages people to eat a more healthy diet by making locally grown vegetables and fruit more attractive and accessible.
Our platform is specifically not designed as an online shop, because we believe that the logistics of that would not be doable for small farms. Instead, we encourage customers to visit the farms and buy produce directly on location, to promote a safe but personal shopping experience.
We used HTML, Materialize CSS Framework (and some minor adjustments in vanilla CSS), JavaScript and React to create our website.
On the website, you can get an overview of all the farms who sell produce directly in your region, based on your location.
As we didn’t have enough time to import data from real farms and implement a tool that measures the distance from your location, we added dummy data for the farms and simulated the distance.
For each farm, you can see the most important facts about it, like the distance to your location and the products being sold. You can select an individual farm to get more detailed information about it as well as the contact details.
In the future, we would like the farms to be able to edit this section themselves to promote their business. Ideally, we want the user to be able to add preferences, like specific products you search for, by using a search bar.
That is also a feature that needs to be implemented in the future due to time constraints.
Finally, there is a contact form for users to contact us. We used MongoDB to store the contact information in the database.
First, we hope to make an impact by encouraging people to get to know their local area better and find sustainable shopping opportunities close to their home, so it becomes easy and convenient.
By setting up this alternative sales opportunity, our goal is to help local businesses to survive these difficult times even if the pandemic takes a longer time.
Additionally, the direct contact through OurHarvest is safer during the pandemic than visiting a crowded farmers market in the city, as there are less people at the same time in the same place.
This might help people who are at risk to navigate the new normal more easily, by giving them access to fresh and regional produce.
Finally, an improved overall health by eating a healthy diet with lots of fruit and veggies can also be beneficial during corona times.
Maybe, buying lots of veggies at a nearby farm can become a real alternative to supermarket shopping for some people in the long term.
This project was bootstrapped with Create React App.
In the project directory, you can run:
Runs the app in the development mode.
Open http://localhost:3000 to view it in the browser.
The page will reload if you make edits.
You will also see any lint errors in the console.
Install dependencies for the front-end side of the project.
Install dependencies for the backend server
Run the Express server only Open http://localhost:5000 to view it in the browser.
Run the client(front-end) & server(back-end) with concurrently
Launches the test runner in the interactive watch mode.
See the section about running tests for more information.
Builds the app for production to the build folder.
It correctly bundles React in production mode and optimizes the build for the best performance.
The build is minified and the filenames include the hashes.
Your app is ready to be deployed!
See the section about deployment for more information.
Note: this is a one-way operation. Once you eject, you can’t go back!
If you aren’t satisfied with the build tool and configuration choices, you can eject at any time. This command will remove the single build dependency from your project.
Instead, it will copy all the configuration files and the transitive dependencies (webpack, Babel, ESLint, etc) right into your project so you have full control over them. All of the commands except eject will still work, but they will point to the copied scripts so you can tweak them. At this point you’re on your own.
You don’t have to ever use eject. The curated feature set is suitable for small and middle deployments, and you shouldn’t feel obligated to use this feature. However we understand that this tool wouldn’t be useful if you couldn’t customize it when you are ready for it.
You can learn more in the Create React App documentation.
To learn React, check out the React documentation.
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