AgriCity

AgriCity is an online marketplace that enhances sustainable urban farming with comprehensive approaches; provide a marketplace for urban-farmers to sell their products, ease nutritious food access to citizen in general, and enable fund-raising system to sustain urban farms' maintenance for the low-income farmers.

AgriCity is an online marketplace (Mobile App + Website) to accommodate, enhance, and sustain urban farming. It enables monetization tha adds economic value of urban farming products. It has comprehensive benefits; (1) enables urban farmers to sell their products, (2) provides a market where citizen could access and buy nutritious food, and (3) is equipped with fund-raising option to accommodate low-incomes urban farmers sustaining their farms, while at the same time citizen in general could contribute to this movement.

In sustainable urbanism practices, urban farming is declared as one of the best solutions to provide sustainable, accessible, and nutritious food supply to urban inhabitants. At this context, citizen actually needs urban farming products to meet their food demands. Urban farming also benefits the city by adding more green spaces that will improve the environment. Yet to begin, urban farming needs an extra work as in today’s practices, the approach only relies on people’s awareness and willingness. In other words, urban farming still relies to people’s voluntary act to sustain. This challenges the urgent need to spread urban farming movement, especially to the urban poor and the low-incomes that are not accessible to healthy food products. Therefore, it needs monetization approach that will add economic value of urban farming’s products that will enhance the willingness of the people to start farming. AgriCity provides a place for this. Even better, AgriCity enables low-income urban farmers sustaining their farms.

AgriCity is suitable to be implemented in any city, but will benefit more in developing countries, like Indonesia. AgriCity not only enhance urban planning movement, but also ensure its sustainability. As the result, the sustainability of food supply to urban inhabitants will be increased. Moreover, AgriCity contributes in reducing unemployment and poverty as more people will gain more income by being urban farmers.  

AgriCity solves (1) urban food supply inaccessibility by enhancing urban farming movement, as it creates a new accessible market of healthy food for citizen. (2) It tackles challenge that in the fact, today’s urban farming relies only to citizen’s voluntary act. As AgriCity (3) enables urban farmers to add economic value on their products, thus enhancing citizen’s willingness to start farming. AgriCity (4) will solve low-incomes urban farmers’ problem to sustain their farms by enable fund-raising option. (5) Therefore, it contributes in reducing poverty, and unemployment. (6) It also contributes in adding more green spaces for environmental resilience. 

During my primary observations on Surakarta’s (an Indonesian city) urban farming practices, I found that it has a potential to contribute greatly to food supply. But, it only relies on people’s awareness and willingness. Therefore, it requires people to fund their own farm to sustain, as they don’t expect any profit in return. Then, urban farming becomes more exclusive to the citizen who are able to fund, or, some of the grass-root communities rely on outside funding. AgriCity’s approach to enable monetization of farming products and cooperation among citizen, will be able to provide sustainable food supply. 

For urban area, AgriCity grows urban farming movement and ensure its sustainability that will contribute massively for its environment quality. For citizens in general, AgriCity provides accessible online market to buy healthy local food, new employment opportunity, and a place to collaborate and contribute to urban farming movement. For urban farmers, side income, healthy food supply, and funds for their farms. 

Track from the app and website. - 10000 people in 8 major cities in Indonesia sign up for AgriCity account

Track from the app and website. - 1000 transaction made in AgriCity

Track from the app and website. - 200 fund-raising demand fulfilled in AgriCity

Startups that accommodates B2B marketplace between citizens and rural farmers are growing, but still not many for urban farming. Whereas, urban farming has a big potential for sustainable urban food supply. At the same time, most practices of urban farming rely on voluntary acts that risks the sustainability of it. Monetization of urban farming products are not common yet, and AgriCity enables it. Furthermore, the main innovation of AgriCity is its fund-raising options. It helps low-income urban farmers to fund their farms, while at the same time enables citizens in general to collaborate into urban farming movement. 

The idea AgriCity was born based on the concern over the inability of urban farmers, especially low-incomes, sustain their farm. Moreover, there is other concerns over growing urban issues that affects citizen, from environmental degradation to unemployment, most importantly at this context, is sustainable food supply. In this human-centered context, AgriCity accommodates the people to be able to access healthy food, earn side incomes, and having a better environment’s quality. It is designed to meet the needs of the people. While AgriCity team, on its future growth-stage, will also gladly receiving feedbacks from the urbanites to continuously improving our service. 

AgriCity will be available for mobile download through Android AppStore or AppleStore for free, or just go to its website. It works just like the common online stores system, but equipped with options to collaborate by funding urban farms or, for urban farmers to ask funding (fund-raising) to support their farm maintenance. Urbanites will just need to sign up for an account to join AgriCity by giving basic information and email. 

During the initial research and development phase to create a pilot, we rely on volunteers, students, and experts with the help from URDC Laboratory at Universitas Sebelas Maret. Then, after the pilot is created we will look for unrestricted funding from various foundations willing to fund. At this stage, we will be able to hire people with various necessary ability to support our growth. Then, after the pilot is tested and shows interests from the people we will look for investors and create partnerships with governments that are willing to implement our system into their city.

We are still currently on the very early stage of building AgriCity, therefore we need more data to support its development. The other problem is that human resources. Our team will need to recruit more team members that from IT, product development, and marketing background. As today we only consist of urban planners. 

SOLVE is a community of experts and creative people who are very experienced in innovations. Therefore, AgriCity team beliefs that this community will guide us in creating pilot, giving feedbacks, critics, and opinion on our solution. Those inputs will benefit us to create better product. Through the network of SOLVE, it will also provide us the link to partners and investors that is beneficial for our growth. 

AgriCity on initial stage is going to be implemented as a part of URDC Laboratory at Universitas Sebelas Maret (Surakarta). Therefore, the university will support; human resources, laboratory, and finance.