Empire State of Food: Why I chose to help local farms grow

Growing up, I remember the struggle when my dad first started working in the agriculture industry 30 years ago. Today he grows hundreds of thousands of grafted plants at a time in his own greenhouses and oversees over two hundred employees. Back then however, when he first started, he had no connections and no capital. Bigger greenhouse corps controlled most of the industry, and getting a piece of the pie was just a dream that did not happen for many. I don’t remember lacking anything, but my older brother does. We could not afford his lactose-free milk.

When Leanna Mulvihill and Prasenjit Roy first told me about her idea of creating more opportunities for local farms by building a two-sided marketplace that connects local farmers with institutional buyers I was very excited. I get to use my knowledge in data science and optimization methods to make this market a little fairer game? Where do I sign.

Prasenjit and Leanna have been working on this for over a year, as part of their Specialization Project research at Cornell Tech. You can read about their journey in the blog, Empire State of Food. Over the next few months, we will be building the interface for both the farmers and the institutional buyers. We will further define the product and matching algorithms and perform user testing and interviews. We are working towards running a pilot by mid semester and are already recruiting farmers for it. We have all taken the Empire State of Food into account when choosing our courses this semester to make sure we can bring all the expertise we can into building the Empire State of Food.

I am very excited to join both Leanna and Prasenjit in their journey together with Daniel Nissani, my data science partner in crime. Daniel and I have worked on previous research together. His rigor, his willing to invest in learning to move projects forward, and our shared vision of putting data to influence things that matter make it a real joy to have him again as a teammate. Leanna’s domain expertise and contagious positive energy together with Prasenjit’s strategic thinking and can-do attitude make us the dream team to bring this idea to reality. We are all happily committed to make this idea happen and luckily for us all, we really enjoy working together, which makes this journey that much more exciting.