A better vision for the future
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Growing food closer to where it's eaten reduces the carbon footprint.
Most people living in cities have growing space available. Whether it's
a big suburban backayard or a pot on a window sill, most residences have
space to grow something. We're also going to be seeing more grow
factories like this pesticide-free one from Japan:


http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/07/140717-japan-largest-indoor-plant-factory-food/


Software can help
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The path for global transition to this better future is going to be
helped by software. The sooner we build the software to facilitate
the transition, the sooner global uptake is likely to occur.

We are proposing to build an open source software system to efficiently
determine what to grow where. It will offer a database backend and a web
interface, with the option of sharing data globally, or with any
server(s) you choose (including none at all if you just want to use it
to track the fields on your own farm).


This will allow people to specify the growing areas they have available,
including details like size, soil pH and climate conditions. It will
also allow potential buyers to register interest in having particular
items grown in their area. The system will then match the growing areas
to a database of crop types, make recommendations as to what would grow
well in a given area, and give the grower an idea of how likely it is
that each product will sell in their local area. In the future it could
be expanded to co-ordinate delivery from disparate growers to disparate
buyers.