Hello Harvest Project

Theme: Cloud

Why Hello-Harvest?

The Indian supply chain structure that is currently being implemented is not really beneficial to the farmers even though they are the key to the entire process. As per the Department of Agriculture and farmers welfare. The average return that a farmer gets for his/her product is less than 25%. The sole reason behind this is the presence of a middleman or a structure that acts as an agent between the source and the market. This also directly influences price fluctuation.

How we approached the problem?

We suggest a service that removes the presence of a middle man and directly puts the source I.e farmers, at the forefront of the business. The proposal is to include and create a local organization managed by the government that can collect and provide the products to the online service that we suggest, which distributes the collected goods to either the local online market on a daily/weekly/monthly basis or based on demand i.e, pre-booked bulk orders for large customers ranging from event coordinators to hotels and restaurants.

The app we propose will have two service endpoints. One focused on the customer and the other on the producers.

Description:

“HelloHarvest!” - A product designed to deliver and support Indian farmers and customers to ensure that their supply needs are met correctly within the timeframe and the quality of the goods provided is exceptional. We have defined our product in such a way that the middleman is removed and maximum profit is directly credited to the farmers/producers. A local community is overseen and managed by a local governing authority to ensure every farmer in the community will be provided the ability to cultivate and deliver their goods which can be sold well within the community or with large-scale organizations and hotel chains.

With the deployment of HelloHarvest even small farmers who are having less land can be introduced to terrace farming or pool farming (unused lands can be shared among people for farming multiple products so that the landowner can receive a certain amount of product by lending the area and also the farmers will not be denied their opportunity to build products because of lack of enough land).

HelloHarvest provides two endpoints-

• The customer-centric “ Hello-Customer Portal” is where customers can buy in the local online store or pre-book required orders from large farmer communities.
• The farmer/producer-centric ”HelloFarmer portal” where farmers can see the required demand and cultivate products based on the demand or sell their pre-made or homegrown products which are market-ready in the local online market.

HelloHarvest at the farmer endpoint is working based on a local governing authority because the demand can be divided equally and a fixed quality control guideline can be established.

The Hello-Customer Portal:

• The HelloCustomer Portal will be inclusive to the registered users, where they can buy products based on their priority.

There will be two sections:

The first one is the local online market: page based on the locality, where the organic and homegrown products with lower cultivation periods ranging from 1 - 2 months and certain products that have longer life periods in storage(ex: Packed rice, wheat, etc). Here the targeted customers will be people within a certain radius of the locality. This ensures that farm-fresh products can be delivered well within the community to ensure growth for the local market. The online shopping portal will be designed based on a simple and easy-to-use UI. The customer can give ratings to the delivered products as well.

Advantages

• Once the local market page is able to deliver the products well within the demand, it will also help the local delivery system to grow as well.
• This will also have certain control over the price point for daily-use products.
• The quality of the products will be ensured by the local governing body and certifications will be given to the local producers/farmers beforehand by the local governing authority.
• Also quality checks will be done by the same local organization before packing.

The second section will be the one where bulk orders can be made in advance by hotel-restaurant chains or larger organizations that are in need of larger amounts of product. This will include products that are cultivated on a seasonal basis, or products that have a longer cultivation period, say 3-4 months. It also includes organic vegetables, fruits, and homegrown products as well, but since the quantity of the goods needed is high, the customer should pre-book the order with a forecasted date of delivery and a booking amount. This method ensures that farmers can focus their resources to cultivate products only for the required demand. To explain this, let’s say that a hotel book X quantity of vegetables, Since the group of farmers, are managed by a government-overseen local community, the demand(X) can be divided among multiple producers to ensure, that everyone from small farmers to large scale producers will be included equally involved in the production and they’ll be paid for their allocated demand(X/n) - where n being the number of farmers/producers who are capable of delivering the required product from their farm.

Advantages:

• The advantage of the method involving pre-booking is that the farmers can use the “On-demand delivery strategy” so they do not need to make more products which would make the scenario of supply>demand and hence go for a price drop for selling.
• The method ensures a fixed price even before the production starts.
• The other advantage is that the customer who is buying is also buying the goods for an early agreed-upon fixed price so that their budget also can be handled well since the economic conditions of the current day won’t influence their pre-booked order.
• The method will ensure growth opportunities not just in the agricultural domain but also in the delivery system as the goods are collected from the source and delivered to the customer directly.
• There is transparency and trust involved in the process. This can promote the customer’s brand as well since they will be directly influencing the local market to ensure growth for the farmer community.
• Also, the clients can be given an option based on the visit and evaluate the cultivation process if the source also agrees on this.
• The quality of the products will be ensured by the local governing body and certifications will be given to the local producers/farmers beforehand by the local governing authority. Also quality checks will be done by the same local organization before packing.

HelloFarmer portal:

The HelloFarmer portal will be unique to the producers/Sources including the farmers and the local governing community.

If the orders are booked for the local community, i.e, for low-supply products - daily use products that are bought by people within the community. An online shopping platform from which the customer would book their orders and farm-fresh products can be delivered to customers directly. Here when a customer books in order, it will be notified to the producer directly in their dashboard.

If the orders are booked as bulk for large organizations, the local authority can divide the demand across the farmers and an estimate can be made on how much quantity each farmer/producer can deliver if there are multiple farmers cultivating the same product. In this case, the booked quantity is shown in the local community dashboard. They can divide it among themselves.

In case the booked demand is higher than the production capacity of the community, the local community can associate with the neighboring communities to divide the demand. Thus ensuring the demand is delivered without fail.

Features:

We have defined our product in such a way that the middle-man is removed and maximum profit is directly credited to the farmers/producers The customer-centric “ Hello-Customer Portal” is where customers can buy in the local online store or pre-book required orders from large farmer communities. The farmer/producer-centric ”HelloFarmer portal” where farmers can see the required demand and cultivate products based on the demand or sell their pre-made or homegrown products which are market-ready in the local online market. A local governing authority is created because the demand can be divided equally and a fixed quality control guideline can be established. Industry-specific quality control checks. Transparency in business since products are delivered directly to the customer and orders are made directly to the producer. Simple and easy-to-use UI Google cloud features ensure maximum accuracy in service delivery. Ensuring growth in the local market. Price control to a certain extent.

Future-scope: Adding eggs and other dairy agricultural products which have low storage lifespan into the market. Developing a delivery system rather than leaning on external delivery service providers. Exposure to the global market to promote import business Adding the other markets by including dairy and meat products. Ability to invite and include funding from external investors to promote organic home farming as a high-level business opportunity. By ensuring that large organizations use the service to book bulk products, we can promote the organization’s brand as they are also a part of providing the farmers in India a helping hand. To build and enable a local delivery system.

Tech Stack

HTML, CSS React JS, GCP, Google Cloud Storage, Google Maps API, Google Cloud for supply chain and logistics,

Addressing the acceptance criteria:

1. Novelty / Originality
2. Practicality / Feasibility
3. Usefulness / Desirability
4. Sale-ability / Biz Viability
5. Scalability / Platformization

Originality

The idea originated during a conversation within the team while discussing the factors that influence market price fluctuation in India while there were farmer protests going on in the country.

Practicality

• Hello-Harvest is most practical because of the current supply chain system in India, or even it can be said that we do not have a defined structure for agriculture supply chain.
• When a product such as Hello-Harvest is introduced, it can be a game changer.
• UI and operations being easy to learn, anyone can pick it up easily.

Usefulness

• Farmers will be able to receive the profit they deserve, rather than a basic price.
• Farmers will be exposed to the market behavior and will be able to use their farmlands based on the demand of the products.
• Since farmers will be deciding the price of the products in the market, there is a lesser chance for price fluctuation.
• Customers will be able to buy farm fresh products directly from the source.
• Large organizations can directly buy products based on their requirement hence reducing wasting and will be able to buy products well within their budget.

Sale-ability / Biz Viability

• Agriculture is a profitable business and this is something the working class doesn’t approve of.

• If a product such as Hello-Harvest is introduced, and the business is digitalized, more people can take up on agriculture as a business opportunity.

• Since customers will be able to buy farm fresh products, there is not much risk associated with health and hence customers will surely come back to buy fresh products.

• Once large organizations buy directly from source, their credibility increases as they are using products that are grown and provided to them on a forecasted date, there is no need to use chemicals to keep them stored for a long time.

  Let’s look at a case study to explain the profit and business demand of the same:

  • Source: https://www.agrifarming.in/tomato-profit-per-acre-cost-of-cultivation-yield-in-india

  • The case study we are currently looking at is of Tomato cultivation project per acre and let us get into the full details of the farming expenses, income and returns from 1 acre of cultivation.

  • The total duration of tomato cultivation is from 110 to 140days.

  • And a farmer can generate an average of 1 ton- 10,000kg of tomato per acre. From the research we were able to identify that the total production cost is about 30,000(ranging from seed purchase cost to harvesting).

  • A middleman/buyer buys the total ton of the product for 15/kg, that is for a total of 1.5laksh, making the farmer get a profit of 1,20,000.

  • And the middleman sells it for 65per kg as per today’s market rate, so for a whole 6.4lks, say taxes, transportation and storage cost him a 2lkhs in total, his total profit would be around 2-3 lakhs.

  • We propose a system where this 2-3 lakhs of extra profit can be directly credited to the source/producer/farmer.

  • From this case study we can see that the numbers involved, a service percent of 8-14% based on the the products sales of the bulk orders are more than good enough for the server and tech stack prices and it can create a profit margin to the service provider for about 5-9%

Scalability / Platformization

• The app can be easily migrated to android making it accessible to everyone with a smartphone.
• In the prototype submitted now, only an admin will be able to accept large orders(bulk orders) after having a discussion with the farmers and then making a decision. It can be automated using ML algorithms.
• The backend can be modernized with newer technologies which can be more customizable.
• It can be associated with the government and then provide support from the agriculture board in India.
• A delivery system can be built and deployed for the Hello-Harvest!
• Once the app is built on an industry scale and deployed, it will create a lot of job opportunities
• Every farmer can be considered as an employee of the Hell-Harvest and once connected to the government will be able to receive benefits.

Deployment to Cloud

• We have created a LAMPSTACK server in GCP to host the full end-to-end application.
• The codes from git are clone to the LAMPSTACK server.
• LAMPSTACK will automatically handle the hosting through apache server.
• The phpmyadmin handles the database for our webapp.
• The LAMPSTACK provide a free instance for phpmyadmin and we need to create database and tables for the webapp to handle the database.
• LAMPSTACK instance of Hello-Harvest: http://34.163.84.98/