Seed2Table

A website and application utilizing weather data gathered through a sensor to provide plant care instructions, thus encouraging the millions of city residents to grow their own produce. 

Simply put, we want to make growing plants easier. This will be done by creating a product that can inform gardeners of all backgrounds how to water and care for their plants. The main part of the product will be to help the user determine how much to water their plants. Environmental conditions will be the factors taken into account when calculating this. There will be two parts to this product, hardware, and software.

The hardware will consist of a physical sensor that will be placed into the garden bed. The sensor will be placed in the center of a garden bed or in a pot where the humidity and air temperature can be measured. The sensor will then send this data to a program, which will be the software, this will use the input to determine the watering amounts of each plant species (as defined by the user). The output will be a measurable amount of water the user will give to each plant.

The global problem we are attempting to solve is that people in lower-income households, who don’t have the proper resources to source their food sustainably, turn to cheaper, large corporations. This causes health concerns for those people as well as negative environmental impacts. On a smaller scale, individuals who want to change this are under the impression that it would be too difficult, or that they aren’t living in the right conditions to be able to start growing their own produce. We are trying to negate this idea. 

In Massachusetts urban areas like Boston and Lowell are mainly apartment housing and very congested, lacking open space for growing private gardens. Our goal is to show these people they are still able to grow produce.

Many people can’t afford fresh produce and the CDC informs that having a healthy diet with fresh fruit and vegetables significantly lowers the risk of chronic illness and obesity for adolescents. Having a healthy diet is also linked to a longer lifespan and less heart disease.

Furthermore, even though it is cheaper to buy processed, shipping these from far locations adds CO2 into the air. CO2 absorbs heat and prevents it from leaving the atmosphere, warming the globe. Additionally, the packaging doesn’t get disposed of properly and instead ends up in landfills harming organisms inhabiting those areas.

Our solution serves people struggling financially in highly developed areas. Our idea will help increase the quality of their lives by giving them an opportunity to create a self-sustaining food source without having to invest time and resources they don’t have to spare. Which will aid in supporting the health of not only the people but also the planet.

People in these communities don't have access to both cheap and healthy food options. This leads them to buy cheap unhealthy replacements which can lead to health problems in the future. 

According to research done by Cleveland State University, the percentage of obese adolescents in low-income families is nearly twice the amount of those in the middle class. By producing their own fruits or vegetables, people using this product will gain a healthier diet and in the long run, save money by having to buy fewer groceries weekly. Plus the product will aid them in maintaining their “gardens”, by providing resources to ensure only essential, good quality materials are purchased and money isn’t wasted on replacements.

We have created and distributed a survey in order to gain a basic idea of the views of our target audience regarding plant growth and produce cost. We’re also collecting contact information from participants to use for more in-depth interviews in the future. This survey is being publicized to residents of populated cities in our area like Boston. We are collecting data such as relative income, residential status, access to produce, and thoughts on learning how to garden. We plan to use this data to better shape our product towards the needs of these people.

We are also planning to conduct behavioral studies to see what people do when buying produce, whether they go for fresh produce or cheaper processed goods. Or when faced between buying a plant that will give them long-term benefits or buying harvested produce, a fast solution but short-term benefit.  

Our solution addresses improving the health of low-income communities as well as combating climate change and pollution. This is done by encouraging people to use more sustainable food options thus reducing carbon emissions from shipping as well as reducing pollution from single-use packaging. 

We are in this selected stage of development as we are currently in the process of gathering materials in order to conduct a series of experiments. We have also planned the details of our experiments, as well as how we plan to utilize the data for the end product. Up to date, we have set up a timeline of goals we want to accomplish in order to produce our product. Additionally, we have begun the framework for the interactive parts of our product, i.e the website. Plans for the experiments have been constructed and how we plan to utilize the data for the end product has been determined.

The goal of the experiments is to allow us to find a consistent relationship between humidity and soil moisture retention, as this allows understanding of how to compensate when watering plants.

The sensor technology will be utilized to collect data to calculate watering amounts. Examples of the data these sensors will collect are the humidity, and temperature of the plant’s environment. 

The user interface will consist of an app and a website. It will allow users to set up an account in which they can enter the plants they are growing. Based on this, the website/app will inform them of the basic care instructions for each plant. The website/application will inform the user of the watering amount which will be updated consistently based on the environmental conditions.

As we are currently in the stages of development next year we are hoping to have a functional product that is being piloted within some local cities. We hope to have 5-10 families testing the product from each city in total, about 40-50 households. We are very committed to ensuring our experiments produce accurate data, so we want to test our product thoroughly before distributing it widely.

We aim to improve the health of people in low-income communities by making produce more accessible through the independent growth of it. 

Our product will decrease transportation and production emissions of large companies by giving people a better option for food, no longer requiring them to buy as much from the companies that offer cheap replacements.

We plan to measure our progress through a timeline consisting of realistic checkpoints. These include:

• Have experiments/research done and conclusions drawn by the end of summer 2022

• Software design done by end of summer 2022

• Software functioning skeleton prototype by end of December 2022

• Hardware design blueprint done while looking for someone to help execute the design building by February 2023 

• Working hardware and software prototypes by May 2023

• Distribute prototypes for testing throughout the summer (the growing season)

Indicators we are planning to use to measure this:

• Amount of investors supporting the project

• Number of people testing the product at a given time

• Number of business partnerships we have established

  • How many are selling our product in their stores 

• Number of people who started to grow their own produce as a result of this product

This is about as far as we have gotten in our planning as it needs to be flexible and will change as we gain a better understanding of how long each step will take

The equipment required for conducting our experiments is very expensive, which is why we entered this challenge, in hopes of receiving some financial support. The experiments are vital to the quality of our product as the user output depends on it. The most vital piece of equipment is a humidity controlled environment, in which humidity can be freely adjusted. Using this we can observe the effects of humidity on the soil moisture.

Furthermore, COVID-19 is making it difficult to speak to people in our target market face-to-face and understand their needs, so we are coming up with solutions to communicate with them through technology.

Through a project we led together a couple years ago to clean up and renovate a local park, we have experience in gathering people to raise funds for projects. Furthermore, we have advocated for ourselves and been strong enough marketers to convince local government figures to help us with the past project. We also know we work well together as the park renovation project was successful and didn’t end with the demise of our friendship ;-)

The current members of our team have strengths that benefit one another and the project as a whole. As one member is well practiced in various coding languages and understanding machine-machine communication. They are also passionate towards understanding and taking action against climate change. While the other member has a lot of experience in garden produce, as well as a well developed understanding of how plants grow and what environmental conditions are the best for different types of produce. They are also an advocate for helping underserved communities. Combining all these characteristics and qualities together will result in a well developed product that benefits both the Earth and the people on it.

As our execution of our product progresses we hope to add one or two representatives of teens from the community we are aiming to serve. We hope to use their knowledge of what people in lower income households can reasonably accomplish with limited resources and time as a foundation of making the design of the product feasible to use. Their input will also allow us to understand any flaws in our product and additions that could be made.

Our solution aims to reduce carbon emissions by reducing people's carbon footprints. Our solution will decrease transportation and production emissions of large companies by giving people a better option for food, no longer requiring them to buy as much from the companies that offer cheap, unhealthier replacements. Additionally, our solution will promote access to sustainable food sources for lower-income urban communities. These communities currently do not have an affordable source of healthy produce. They also do not have the resources, experience, or time needed to grow their own produce. Our solution will make growing produce significantly easier and more accessible therefore giving these communities better food options. In addition to this, our team is made up of two teenage girls both under the age of 18. 

Our team will use the money from the prize to fund our research as well as to gain mentorship on how to improve our business model and networking. To have accurate research, our team needs to use expensive biotech equipment. The money from this prize will help to either buy or rent this equipment.