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App: Fresh.App

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Mission Statement

The 100‐mile diet is a movement growing in popularity with food enthusiasts. It is where people fill their food basket with only locally grown produce eating only seasonally appropriate and regional foods. Ideally, the practitioner of the diet only eats food that is grown or produced within a 100‐mile radius of one’s home. This requires the individual to develop a greater awareness of from where each meal comes. The major impediment to a successful 100‐mile diet is the factor of convenience.

At present, Huron County is home to a diversity of Local Farmers Markets that are enjoyed by visitors and locals. These local markets are only open at set times, usually on weekend mornings, but not all the produce that sold there is locally harvested. For those people trying to fill their food basket with locally grown produce, the local food market might not be the most convenient choice.

Included in the food landscape are individual farmer’s fruit, and vegetable stands along the road‐way at their farm’s gate. These farm gate markets are usually an informal way for local farm families to share some of their extra produce directly with the public. Often these farm gate fruit and vegetable stands are informal, unmanned and work on the honour system meaning that the produce is paid for by the customer in a secure lock‐box. This provides a customer with some guarantee that the produce is grown locally and the satisfaction of purchasing their food directly from those who grow it. For the farmer, this means that they can sell their produce efficiently to their customers with little overhead and reduce the need to transport their produce to their customers. For those people trying to fill their food basket with locally grown produce and those interested in trying to live the 100 mile diet, the option of road‐side farm gate food purchases is appealing. At present, the two main impediments to farm gate food purchases are the distance to drive to the road‐side farm gate and the infrequency of available produce for sale due to the informal nature of how road‐side farm gate stands are managed.

The Fresh.App responds directly to the second impediment whereby, the farmer can inform their customers of the variety and availability of produce for sale in real time with live updates.

It will show buyers where, what, and when fresh food is available directly from the farmers!

Video Presentation

Documentation

Team Members

Yunus Amer Ali: (left) Yunus Amer is a fourth year Computer Science student at The University of Western Ontario. Yunus' favourite fields of Computer Science are Computer Vision, Human-Computer Interaction, and Data Transmission Methods. This is his first year participating in the ECCE app challenge and he has no prior experience with GIS software.

Jenny Tjhin: (middle) Jenny is a second year MSc. student in Geography at Western. Her research uses GIS and spatial statistical methods to detect cluster of points in epidemiology. This is the first time for her to compete in the challenge and she's excited to collaborate with the team.

Martin Healy: (right) Martin will be completing his Ph.D. in Geography this year in the Human Environments Analysis Lab (HEAL). He is using ArcGIS Desktop, ArcGIS Pro, and the R-ArcGIS-Bridge in his research. He has primarily programmed using Python over the last few years and is excited to use the Web App Builder for ArcGIS and delve into the ArcGIS API for JavaScript.