Urban Rural Bridge: of and for farmers

As of 2020, nature has spoken. It demands diversified, ecologically sound, decentralized and localized food production. It demands that we take care of the soil, our families, our communities, the water and the air. 

Our solution gives farmers the tools they need to manage diversified, ecologically regenerative seasonal production. 

A smart-phone toolbox allows farmers to manage and monitor their land, keep records, manage planting and keep updated inventory, thus allowing insights to be extrapolated. The inventory helps to coordinate activity across plots of land, product varieties, farms, cooperatives, communities and more. 

Once farmers are connected to our 'plantform', and maintain relationships with buyers on the the UR Bridge App (URB), it becomes possible to do many things to scale such as AI, IoT, geospatial data and analysis. It also becomes possible to spread knowledge and prove alternative methods that can regenerate soils and ecosystems while producing clean, abundant, nutritious food. 

The alternative farming movement in China has been on the rise for about 12 years at least. When our UR Bridge founder Fred Yang returned to his home village to do organic farming in 2008 he had only an intuitive understanding of the term; he was doing what he recalled other farmers doing when he was a child in the village. 

His story, our advisors and farmer network validate our diagnosis of the key painpoint for people all over China doing similar work.  The three-way disconnect between skilled traditional Chinese farmers, educated back-to-the-landers and customers requires a holistic solution to bridge them. That's URB. 

Since Chinese farmers have never been trained to use spreadsheets, nor do most own a personal computer, the old farmers have an impressive way of keeping a lot of information in their head, but that's not so helpful when trying to coordinate production and labor across multiple farms and varying consumer preferences. URB allows farmers to coordinate production and keep detailed records as they never have before, and effortlessly, using smartphones.  

While the circumstances of Chinese farms are unique, URB aims to simplify organization and planning to empower CSAs, cooperatives and other productive organizations globally.

Our solution is a web-based application organized around a production ledger.

On the platform, farmers can plot their farms and garden beds on the URB map. Using the areas and default profiles from our plant database, farmers can perform basic calculations based on the desired production quanity using simple sliders to adjust the desired quantity, planting area available, maturation time, planting density, market prices and other parameters. 

How much do I need to plant, and when? How much do I need to sell and when will it be ready to harvest? How much does our cooperative have planted? Harvested? Next week? Once produce is 'seeded' in the database, it becomes possible to track progress, updating numbers based on real-time observations.  Not only are these numbers projected for every day in the future, but they are aggregated throughout the farm cooperative.

On the other side of the 'bridge' urban users can follow farmers or cooperatives and purchase individual products or pre-configured basket products. They can pre-order or even make requests of the farmer as they might in a CSA or they can buy from the cooperative's available inventory. Businesses can place bulk orders with cooperatives & remain appraised of crop status.

Our solution aims to improve the lives of producers and buyers alike, as well as the global environment, but we remain decidedly 'farmers first' in our approach. Our solution is targeted in particular at the small-scale farmers who will receive the greatest benefit from the production planning tools and from real-time connection to the market. 

Key examples of our most cherished target users can be found in the mountains of Hunan where founder and farmer Fred Yang worked for four years. The Rainbow of Hope project which resulted connects buyers in Shanghai directly to farmers. One such elderly farmer couple is able to produce a diversity of chemical-free veggies throughout the year and earn additional income form pork, ducks, chickens and eggs. While the average annual household income for the area was less than RMB 2,300 this family was able to earn nearly RMB 35,000  annually. 

We ask young professionals how much they would need to return to their hometowns; they say an income of around RMB 3,000 per month is enough. We believe that our solution will empower farmers to produce high-quality products and get it to market, revitalizing rural communities around China. This is our reason for being.

Small-scale producers are our target users. We give them tools imbued with knowledge in the form of smart phone apps & empower them to supplement that knowledge with their own. Most importantly we connect them to the market. The tools enable farmers to get better yields through improved management and timing of tasks; a difficult feat when growing dozens of seasonal varieties.

Our solution hits other dimensions of the problem (even other challenges) including supply chain issues, scaling BMs and improving producer-market connections. We empower our urban champions to promote more diversified diets & we value manpower as a renewable. 

It's an ecosystem solutions.

Starting from health, ecology, and care first seems innovative for a potentially highly profitable business.

We assume that our app must learn from the wisdom of farmers and the broader community.

We build tools for farmers, rather than hoping to find farmers to use our tools. UR Bridge is actually a network of general consumers, community members, restauraunts, clubs, farms and cooperatives. 

The URB app is just to be a digital manifestation of that network. The app makes it easier for everyone to do the good things they've always wanted to do—for instance, buying lunch menu ingredients from a small permaculture operation near the city—or supplying your company's canteen with organic vegetables and fish from a cluster of villages just outside the city.

The app is described as follows.

Client-server application with a backend that is custom-built from scratch with Ruby, using PostgreSQL database.

Given that Tencent WeChat is the dominating instant messenger in China, in the first version we use its mini-app system for the frontend. In this way, we also make use of its single-sign-on login and its integrated payment system.

Yet we are also considering other platforms, since our codebase is HTML5-ready. It would be straight-forward to port our app native onto Android (PWA Progressive Web App) and browser-based (responsive multi-platform).

Currently we develop closed-source on GitHub and use Travis CI to deploy to hosting (via Passenger). We are considering to open-source it (GPLv3) after successful beta-testing (RC1) along with giving the project independent, community-driven wings.

We have observed that cities all over the world are increasingly crowded, stressful, and expensive. Still, they rely on low-wage workers to keep them funcioning on a basic level and thus we can always observe massive inequality in cities. Meanwhile rural areas have become mere shells of themselves. In many countries as in China their populations are down to a tenth or a quarter, and inhabited mainly by the elderly (60+) and young children. The social fabric of the countryside is in tatters. 

We have observed that many migrant workers and a number of successful professionals with roots in the countryside are willing to return to villages. We know from experience that by working directly with 10-30 families to supply them with some percentage of their food needs, one rural family can earn enough to pay for their children's education and care for their elderly parents in the village. 

We have received abundant verbal, and some material support from local governments to explore this avenue, but they are largly waiting for proof of concept before they would support such a plan meaningfully. A small group of farmers, maybe 10 or 20, could breath new life into any village and kick-start a new renaissance in the countryside. 

Most people intuitively understand the need to feed their bodies and their children with good, clean, and fair food. Similarly, most farmers intuitively understand to give back to the soil, to keep ecology functional, to keep air and waters clean for themselves and for their families — to replace what is taken to provide for future generations. Our objective is to make this easier, more rewarding and meaningful. In the end we want to foster real human connections between cities and villages through CSA models.

By connecting farmer communities to urban communities we can create an engine based on mutual care that can regrow rural communities. With rural communities present and empowered, simple incentives can see that rivers, hills, and ecosystems are protected, that cultural knowledge of place is respected, and that economic and ecological balance between country side and city is corrected. \/                                                                                                              

Currently our proof of concept pilots, which do not yet use the URB app, serve a few hundred people.

We work directly with 17 farmers cooperatives all over China, promotoing them and their products on our platforms through various means and channels. We have only 10-20 families in the city annually that have bought a membership from us (pre-purchasing store credit) and order from the farms regularly. Through various flash-sales and promotion channels we have sold to more than 200 customers in the last year's time, with 95 customers currently browsing the products from time to time and purchasing since the beginning of 2020. 

The annual sales volume will most likely reach a half million RMB this year, or around US $70,000. Only a small portion of this (5%) goes to support our work. about 30-50% of the remainder is needed to cover the expense of shipping directly from the farm to the customer and the farmer keeps everything else. For reference we have ascertaine that a farmer is lucky to get even 5% of the final cost of goods sold in a typical vegetable market in China. 

Our goal for the year is to test the mobile application with a small group of trusted farmers and our community of superfans that have been buying from such farmers through our network on various platforms. We would then have a proof of concept and clearer development roadmap.

Next year, we hope that we could fill a few gaps in the platform's current version, clean up code, improve the user experience and add a few key features based on the farmers' & supporters' feedback. With all the code tested and improved we will try to extend use of the app to all the farmers and cooperatives within our network and heavily promote it to consumers in tier 1 cities. 

If we can improve the app and make it bug-free to meet the needs of one cooperative, for example, we could improve the efficiency of more than 1,000 farmers who serve more than 10,000 buyers in a CSA subscription model. This would allow the organizers of that cooperative to focus on scaling their own impact — improving farming practices or educating more citizens who will become conscious consumers and might become long-term supporters of the cooperatives work.

After 5 years we hope that our app can be used by tens of thousands of farmers, at least, selling products and also engaging in bio-regional commerce on the app between farming cooperatives. This many farmers might be responsible for hundres of thousands of hectares and use various regenerative farm practices to sequester carbon

Finance has been our major barrier. In fact we need to raise roughly US $10-20k in order to get the app to a place where we feel comfortable enough to have the farmers spend time piloting the initial app. 

We are cautious to search for VC funding due to our focus on social impact. Everything we have accomplished so far has been self funded or volunteered by a few core founders, most notably Fred Yang (FOncounder) and Gregory Burgess (Development Lead). A small grant of EU 10,000 has helped things along a bit - but most work on the app has been 'invested' at contributors own risk. 

We would like to eventually find an appropriate open-sourcing strategy so that development of the platforms potential should not be limited by the knowledge and creativity of our own team. 

Once we have proven that our app can work and that farmers are willing to use it for production planning, we expect to revisit a number of potential funders who wanted to see more proof of concept. These include IFOAM, Chinese impact investment funds and many individuals that are interested in putting their money into something meaningful as investors.

However, there is a possibility based on our business model that a functional app will become self-funding. 

We have a HK based company registered in the name of Urban Rural Bridge, while we operate based on a privately owned company under full control of our Founder.

We are open to a number of structures in the long run, as long as they help propel us toward our mission. 

Many people have contributed, however currently only the founder works on the solution full-time, while three others remain as support and work on various projects and aspects connected to the app. The main developer is currently on hiatus. 

We are well-positioned to deliver only because we have been working together for around 5 years, and are determined to keep working on it as long as there is any promise of its success. We have been through difficult times and are aligned in our values, though we have rarely had the pleasure of all being in the same place at the same time. 

Additionally, 12 years of work on the part of the founder, Fred Yang has built a vast network that continues to bring new opportunities and connections.

We ware currently working with a restaurant called Urban Soup Kitchen (USK). USK has created QR codes that go out with lunch boxes for delivery and lunch sets in the restaurant that leads their customers to our online store where they can purchase from our trusted farmer network. 

USK is purchasing foods at a discounted rate based on an innovative sliding scale - it allows him to purchase certified organic produce from a large-scale organic farm in our network and in return he promotes these foods to his customers via QR code and in weekend 'know your farmer' mini farmers market display in its locations. In addition to these USK is promoting a three-way cooperative model between a farm, a restaurant, and consumers. This is an innovation that we would eventually make available to the users of our app, and support such models in its functionality. 

The organic farm, based in Shandong, is also waiting on our finished platform, anticipating that if it functions as described, it can help them to save a lot of administration and marketing costs. 

We have also had some enjoyable campaigns with Naked Group and are looking at more ways of collaborating to bring rural areas to life, while bring good, clean, fair foods to them. 

We also have a long-term relationship ongoing with Slow Food China, which has given support in various ways over the last four years. 

For our current development work, we will take 5% as a transaction fee when customers buy from farmers on the platform, to be paid by customers.

The platform works in such a way that real-time inventory will only be adjusted correctly when the farmer makes a sale through the app - this is also the basis of automatic accounting and other metrics that will be helpful for the farmer. 

Small holder farmers are generally very happy to pay only 5% to sell directly to customers at a premium as they would typically receive only 5% of the final price. In other words, if you buy $100 worth of vegetables at the wet market in China, the farmer probably only got $5 of that money. We provide immense value to the farmer, but also transparency and a unique kind of engagement for customers who can actually talk to their farmers or visit them if they desire to do so. 

Solution Technology and Talent Recruitment

We would like to have a robust API that will support full traceability of food products from seed to shelf/table (blockchain). 

It should also eventually integrate with technology from frontrunners such as regen.network so that farmers and cooperatives can receive additional incentives for restoring ecosystem function on their land, also proving the benefits of regenerative farming methods. (IoT, AI satellite and remot sensing) 

We also want the results of farmers' labor, timing, and variety choice to be monitored by AI  so that farmers can join in climate adaptation activities, as well as benefitting from market insights about demand for basic and specialty produce. 

We hope to go big and eventually international, so Legal and Regulatory seems like it will be important.

We would like to partner with companies providing knowledge of and training in various green, renewable, clean, technologies and regenerative farming practices so that they can reach the massive audience of Chinese farmers. e.g. Dr. Elaine's Soil Food Web for soil microbiome management and no-till advocacy, Dr. Juergen Kleinwachter's stirling engines for energy autonomy, regen-network for business model development and monitoring, etc.

WE are also interested in exploring partnership with IoT companies that focus on soil monitoring to aid in automation and problem detection.

Ultimately UR Bridge is an ecosystem solution, and will seek as many partners as possible to achieve mutual goals.  

We see the floating population of Chinese migrant workers as a kind of refugee population. They are not able to remain in their hometowns under the current paradigm, thus they are refugees. Our very reason for being is to create a situation that is favorable for their return to their ancestral homes where they will be able to live in harmony with nature while still providing every possible opportunity to their own children. 

UR Bridge envisions the URB app and various manifestations of the same technology empowering migrant communities wherever they are. Empowering them to take stewardship over the land and provide the service of growing clean healthy food for urban citizens, and receiving a fair price in return.

If we receive the Andan Prize, we would be more able to prioritize the internationalization and open-sourcing of the app. We could give license to local NGO's who work with such populations as well as support to modify and integrate the technology.

We have observed, as many NGO's have, that female actors tend to be more detailed and more proactive once new pathways to stability are presented. If we were to receive funding from the Women Prize we would be thrilled to prioritize the training and development of women entrepreneurs and managers within all of the cooperatives, new and existing, within our network. Our charitable partner Open Door Education would, or some of our famous Chinese femal advisors would be engaged to ensure that we prioritize women's leadership as we seek to expand our farm cooperative network.