Virtual Farmer on PartyRock!!
Do not have green fingers? Don't worry, give this game a try before you try it in real life!
Published Mar 10, 2024
I live in one of the greenest city in the world, Singapore! It is probably one of the best city in the world but there are still many way of improvements.
One of Singapore issue would be getting a sustainable food source. It is an almost impossible task given the lack of space (not even land!) and natural resources. Even though our government has been trying their best effort but coming our with policy and programs such as 30 by 30 (https://www.ourfoodfuture.gov.sg/30by30/), I believe that the best way to achieve this goal is to start from each household.
You may ask why farming and not aquaculture. Apart from the obvious reason (do not have necessary resources hahaha :P), I believe that plant bring many unconscious benefits to us.
For Example:
- In a city, plant is used to keep our air clean aka eco-friendly
- As a food source!
- Relief stress aka therapeutic farming
I have tried growing plants, playing around with vermicomposting and I face countless failure even till now. Everything in this city is expensive. TBH, soil might be more expensive than vegetable so farming at home is a luxury. It is not cheap to fail even once and it really crushes people's passion for plant.
For a city-dweller, it is not than we don't love plants, we simply do not have the time to research and get our hands dirty over and over again. We just want a 100% success method. And that is where this app come into place. By using this simulation application, I hope that the success rate will increase when during the "dirty hands" phase. It definitely wouldn't be 100% but it will be amazing if more people living in city is give growing plants a try. I envision this app as a supportive teacher through a simple game to encourage and guide people on the first step to farming.
As describe above, another reason in my heart for the stressful people and even kids aren't spared. That's why I would love to bring therapeutic farming to each household to relieve some of their stress. However, if their plants died after sprouting, it might be more depressing than not growing any (I believed). That is why the success rate of growing plant become very important!
With the use of AI (not perfect), I really hope that more people will start to appreciate plants and reap these benefits from them. This is just a simple first step, there is a lot more to building a "soil-to-table" farming pipeline and I will try my best to make Virtual Farmer a success before moving to the rest.
- Decide on a plant
- Choose a Country
- Type "Plant the seed in the soil" in the chatbot
- Observe the environment and the plant condition
- Take action by telling the chatbot what to do
Need a demo?: https://youtu.be/MqzFLkvTH-k
Thank you for reading this article. Hope you will start to bring plants into your life!
Some of the things I am thinking of doing next: simulate pests, how to choose fertilizer, getting the best soil mix
My background: Web Dev, Data Science, AI, ML
Try Virtual Farmer: https://partyrock.aws/u/fabiantoh98/5UoLdFwdz/Virtual-Farmer
Disclaimer: Opps! This app is not at production level so most function would not work as intended.