iCropMap

Homepage of the app

Inspiration

Have you ever been in a car with your parents, driving through a field, wondering to yourself: How many bushels of corn are out there?" Now you can look that up... on a state level that is.

What it does

This web application allows you to dive in deep and explore the acres of whatever crop was being grown in each state, each year!

How we built it

We leveraged the USDA Agricultural Statistics API for the crop data, FastAPI for the web application, and Folium to implement Leaflet.js in Python.

Challenges we ran into

Although we are competing in the developer section, all of us had very minimal skills using git. This weekend we learned so much about "pruning" and merge conflicts and opening different working trees. We basically fought it for most the weekend but ended up finding the groove. Another issue we ran into was trying to figure out how to make what we had in our heads. None of us knew any web application frameworks, so we jumped straight into React with no regrets. A couple hours later, the regrets piled up, but we still wanted to do a web app. Most of us knew enough about Python to maybe move forward with that. After hoping onto FastAPI, we started to making consistent progress.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

After the first night, we were not too optimistic about our progress. Coming in Saturday morning, we got past that and just went to work. While what we made is nothing crazy, we are proud of the end result.

What we learned

Two of us are more experienced with software, but the other two are freshmen. In the end, we feel proud of what we came up with. Everyone got better managing merge conflicts from the command line, consuming APIs and parsing the JSON responses, and using that data for our web app. We also gained some more experience with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, which is always useful.

What's next for iCROP

In the future, we would love to add more features such as more filtering of results, adding county crop information, and added more ways to process data in general.