You can view the running application at https://www.urbanfarmingnetwork.com/
It’s the practice of growing, processing and distributing food in and around the city. The practice mainly occurs in densely populated areas where there are vacant lands inside a community or in urban area. Such lands are utilized by the farmers and other people who are interested in spending some of their time in cultivating green vegetables, animal husbandry, urban beekeeping, agroforestry and horticulture.
The urban agriculture leads to more access to fresh vegetables, fruits and meat products. Moreover, food security, nutrition and income generation for participants are some of the key motivating factors for such a practice. Urban Farming, as a social cause, helps in giving rise to a social movement for sustainable communities, where the organic growers, foodies and ‘Locavores’, the local groups who like to eat food which is grown nearby to them form a social network on basis of such an initiative. The various areas in which urban farming practice adds to positive effects include economic, social, energy efficiency, reduction in ozone and particulate matter, Soil decontamination, reducing noise pollution, increased nutrition and quality of food and environmental justice.
Urban Farming Network, as a platform, can help the land owners to collaborate with these farmers and the people who are ready to grow food or utilize their time in any activities related to urban farming. With this platform, we can remove the communication gap between farmers and urban land owners. Moreover, it will also help in educating the people about the process of urban farming and share the data of unused lands with the community to promote this noble cause.
- Go to the application, register yourslef either as a farmer if you are interested in farming or as an owner if you have a unused land which can be used for urban farming.
- If you are a farmer, you can search for the available farms near by your current location or any other location.
- Go through each farms, and submit the proposal to the owner of the farm that meets your requirements. You can invite other farmers also in the proposal. You can also view the lists for the community farms and get their contact details.
- After you submit the proposal, the owner will review it, discuss it further with you if needed and take an appropriate action.
- Once the owner accepts the proposal, you are good to go! You can follow the How it works page to know about the further process of application to the government.
- As a farmer, you can also create a feed from My feeds page and promote your work. These feeds are publicly available to users to view. If you select to provide your contact details, they can contact you for more information.
- After you register as an owner, you can manage your farms under My farms page.
- You can also manage the proposals you receive from farmers for your farms once you publish your farms in serach results.
- You can then review these proposals, discuss it further with people involved, get familiar with their ideas, their motivation towards the use of your land. If it all fits well, you can accept the proposal which you want and start the further process of application to the governemnt.
- To see if your land meets the requirements to be converted to urban farm or any other questions, you can go through How it works page.
- As a registered user on Urban Farming Network, you can be actively involved in community associated with urban farming using Forums page.
This project uses the MEAN stack with latest Angular 5 technology
- MongoDB: database
- Express.js: backend framework
- Angular 5: frontend framework
- Node.js: runtime environment
Other tools and technologies used:
- Angular CLI: frontend scaffolding
- Bootstrap: layout and styles
- Font Awesome: icons
- Passport.js: user authentication
- express-sessions: session management
- Bcrypt.js: password encryption
This application is deployed on AWS EC2 instance with registered domain name, with S3 storage also configured to store user files/photos securely.