Assisting Agricultural Practitioners Grow

Providing real-time feedback to Agricultural Practitioners

Advocates For Urban Agriculture is a coalition of urban farms, communities, school gardens, individuals, and businesses working to support and expand sustainable agriculture in the Chicago region. AUA's mission is to educate, endorse good practices, connect, and advocate for policies assisting and helping urban agriculture thrive. Formed in 2002, AUA's community includes more than 2,300 members throughout the Chicago area and beyond.

AUA had the vision of sharing its expertise and knowledge. They wanted to provide farm business owners, community gardeners, and those interested in pursuing farming in Chicago with good practices holistically from the standpoint of food safety, grower safety, conservation, and the implied social impacts of urban farms and community gardens, with the goal of harm prevention in mind. AUA needed a tool that could help provide this information, making it accessible to the public.

The main challenge was finding the sufficient medium to best represent a way to capture information to understand better where common pitfalls were in the field and provide a learning opportunity for users who are using it to understand the good practices. The tool also needs to be accessible to users who don't want their information saved and available for users who wish to come back and review their data.

Our team understood the importance of providing agricultural practitioners and potential practitioners with accurate data and providing the staff with a way of downloading and updating the data as needs changes. We've put together an assessment platform that provides real-time feedback on their selections and results to best account for the vast amount of information that can potentially change.

Each question on the platform is categorized into different categories, with each question having a specific set of feedback and good-to-know knowledge attached to it. As users go through the assessment, their feedback is shown at the end of each category, providing them with good practices and reiterating why it is crucial if they are already performing well.

This project was done in partnership with Edwin Menacho.