FarmEZ
FarmEZ
In 2019, I was selected as 1/27 of 25,000 applicants globally for the Young Sustainable Impact Incubator. I was tasked with identifying a problem and solution within the food value chain, with the support of YARA and the YSI program.
My team was based in France, the Philippines, and Taiwan, while I was based in the United States. We met at the end of the program in Oslo, Norway.
Working completely remotely, over 12 hours of time differences was the biggest challenge.
Research
Our goal was to identify what changes are needed in the food value chain so it becomes drastically better for farmers?
We started by interviewing and surveying:
3 Fertilizer Companies Interviewed
200 Farmers Surveyed
5 Farmers Interviewed
5 Food Distributors Interviewed
3 Consumers Interviewed
It became clear early on that farmers were receiving the short end of the stick and that we would want to focus on them.
We were able to separate the farmers into four different key groups, identify their emotions and goals.
Following this, we are able to identify three key gaps that all farmers faced globally that were also different than the other stakeholders.
Alignment
After identifying the key gaps, our next step was to identify what encompassed those gaps and allowing us to identify our focus areas:
Lack of 24/7 real time support - from here we learned farmers valued strong personal relationships
That they don’t realize that they need to change as climate changes - we identified that this was simply not a priority for farmers
Lack of access to agridatabases - we learned they didn’t know what information to trust
We then reframed the problem to: How can we drastically help farmers feel better when the food value chain is changing? and segmented to focus on Junior Farmers and Farming Entrepreneurs.
Finalizing Product
After mapping out the food journey, interviewing a 20 more farmers, and identifying our capabilities as a team, what was already available in the market, and the biggest needs, we identified that designing a platform for farmers to view price and weather information would be the most helpful.
The second iteration of the design can be seen on the right and it is was tested with 100 farmers in North India and 20 farmers in the Philippines, before being phased out due to the pandemic