How can City Residents help Revitalize Soil for Organic Food?
This prototype has been developed by the Team - “City for Food” for Hackathon for Good as part of the Indo Data Week 2020, a co-creation sprint organized by DAV Data Solutions in partnership with World Startup and the Government of Telangana.
Team members of “City for Food” are:
Ar. Srishti Raizada, Yashvardhan Deoda, Mert Gül and Raghavendra
All around the world, governments, organizations, and civil societies are starting to work toward the United Nations — Sustainable Development Goals with a vision to achieve the aim of the New Urban Agenda, which is about “leaving no one behind” in the process.
Challenge
One of the most important global goals is to achieve ‘food security’ in cities through the production of organic food by revitalizing the soil. The challenge is how can it be done? To come up with innovative ideas, the Emerging Technologies Wing of the Government of Telangana posed us with a challenge in “Hackathon for Good” - to rejuvenate soil health by reviving the ecology of our environment to provide organic food; in which we participated with full enthusiasm.
Soil health is connected with several aspects of ecology like plant growth and productivity, regulation of the carbon cycle, improving biodiversity, development of resistance to pests, and supporting the water cycle. Protecting, managing, and restoring soil health has multiple benefits of carbon sequestration, improving biodiversity, regulating the water cycle, and improving food security.
Our challenge is to innovate with a focus on food security in cities, which will be supporting the SDGs 1,6,8,12,13,15.
Design
From understanding the whole situation, there are essential observations in designing for food security in cities, like:
- On one side, there is a requirement to rejuvenate the soil health of the agricultural fields, which are situated in peri-urban areas and rural areas from the city.
- On the other side, there is a need to fulfill good quality organic food for the residents of the city.
- The third aspect is related to the problem of carbon emissions contributing to climate change, from the biodegradable food waste going to landfills in cities.
How can we use the problem of organic food waste disposal in cities to revive soil health for producing organic food in peri-urban or rural regions’ agricultural farms?
Innovation
Using the biodegradable waste in cities as manure for revitalizing soil fertility in agricultural lands of peri-urban and rural areas to produce organic food for cities.
For this project, the following stakeholders would be working with cohesiveness towards the sustainability of the project:
- Farmers as producers of organic food will be utilizing the fresh manure coming from the nearby wards in cities;
as one of the important aspects of sustainability is to consider “least distance traveled” which will also help in securing the tools, techniques, and knowledge for farmers to practice organic farming, from the nearby city residents and government; through a digital application for developing direct connection among farmers, experts and scientists in government and city residents (developing a support system for improving sustainability).
The digital application will also include a feature for depicting soil conditions, native crops to be sown according to the seasons, and other details through a QR Code development, to help farmers in improving soil fertility while also understanding the quantity of manure required in agricultural fields.
2. City Residents as consumers of organic food coming from nearby agricultural farms by composting biodegradable waste to be converted to manure in each ward of their city.
The ward-wise composting mechanism would be set up with the help of the government and city residents. Manure from cities gets delivered to nearby farms located in peri-urban or rural areas.
It will create opportunities for environment enthusiasts in cities to be involved in the whole eco-system, while practicing their passion for nature, ecology, biodiversity, organic agriculture, horticulture, agroforestry, etc.
3. Government as supporters for facilitating the whole process to be implemented, managed and monitored.
Databases
Soil temperature directly affects plant growth. In other words, nearly every crop slows down its growth when soil temperatures are below 9°C and above 50°C. Germination of various seeds requires different soil temperature ranges. For example, maize starts to germinate at soil temperatures from 7-10°C. Most organisms within soil thrive at temperatures between 25-35°C. Nitrification requires a soil temperature of 32°C.
An AI model that gives the farmer estimates about the crop growth, the crop yield, and recommendations for products to make the yield better.
Since it is not always possible to get soil information (but relatively easy to obtain weather data), we created a model that predicts the soil temperature by using only three pieces of information in this hackathon’s scope:
- Temperature (Celsius)
- Relative Humidity (%)
- Wind Speed (km/h)
The only thing farmer should do is open his/her Location Services on the cellphone and the application will show the farmer (and also the expert on the other side) the required data like:
- Weather Forecast Summary
- Temperature
- Soil Temperature
- Predicted Soil Temperature (Using Deep Learning model)
- Soil Moisture
- Humidity
- Air Quality Index etc.
According to the temperature, the expert and the farmer will know if planting their seeds is suitable at that time frame or not.
Also,
The app will provide a QR Code that shows these specifications listed above to the farmer. So if he/she likes, this QR Code could be attached to the product so that the customer gets information about the food that is harvested at that time.
Here we have the sample, clean data frame on weather & soil conditions:
To predict the soil temperature, the model used more than 100,000 parameters, 5 hidden layers, and hundreds of neurons.
Conclusion
Sustainability projects like these which consider the aim of the New Urban Agenda for inclusive development to promote resilience in the ecosystem, possess the potential to solve problems all over the world.
Team members “City For Food” —
Ar. Srishti Raizada- Architecture, Sustainability & Community Revitalizing Consultant
Yashvardhan Deoda- Industrial Designer and Feature Developer
Mert Gül- Data Scientist
Raghavendra- Data Science Specialist
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