Harvest Hopper

Inspiration

When some of our teammates visited local farms and community gardens in Pitt County, we realized there was a lack of support for people living in food deserts. 1 in 6 children in North Carolina live in food deserts, and about 1.5 million residents in NC face food insecurity. This showed us the role the community plays in connecting local farmers to those facing food insecurities, and there's currently nothing on the market that targets this specific issue. Our app, Harvest Hopper, provides a platform for people to connect with others and find their community.

What it does

Harvest Hopper has three types of users. First, farmers can log the amount of surplus food into the app. Then, the shuttles are notified where to pick up from and the farm gets added to the route. To streamline the process, an estimated arrival time is provided.

The other side of the app is for the consumers. When they log in, they can enter a location or have the app automatically find their location. It will notify them of the closest walkable shuttle stop with an estimated arrival time provided.

Harvest Hopper makes accessing food much more feasible to families living in food deserts. Often times, finding organic food takes too much time or is too far away, making it hard for them to fit it into their daily schedules. Many are unaware of the local resources provided. Our model gives them the platform to find these resources and an easy way to acquire them, motivating them to eat nutrition rich foods.

How we built it

We started with the basic views and buttons for each page: landing, farmer, consumer and shuttle. After that, we fleshed out each of the views with the graphics we created on Canva. Then we incorporated the map into the views, which took the longest. Connecting the data from the different users also took a long time, because we were relatively new to Swift.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was our unfamiliarity with Swift and Xcode. It took a while to get used to the syntax and structure. We also tried to thoroughly test each human interaction, like the buttons and the map. The map proved to be hard to extract user and shuttle information from.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We take pride in our remarkable progress, especially considering our novice status. Despite being beginners, we efficiently tackled a significant amount of coding within a short timeframe. By leveraging each team member's unique strengths, we achieved a lot together.

What we learned

Our journey with Swift has been enlightening, deepening our understanding of iOS development. The pressure of time constraints propelled our learning, making us more adept at navigating the intricacies of app development. Exploring the MapKit framework was particularly fascinating and added valuable skills to our repertoire.

What's next for Harvest Hopper

Looking ahead, we aim to expand Harvest Hopper's reach beyond our local community. Our vision is to scale the platform throughout North Carolina, with aspirations to eventually go national. By extending our services across broader regions, we aspire to make a more significant impact on agricultural communities and food distribution networks.