Planet Murple inspires kids to explore natural food through creative cooking and playful media. We help kids and their families build happy relationships to healthy food! Our world is based on a fantastical planet made entirely of natural food and follows the adventures of the Murples. Kids interact with the Murples through Storytime Recipes via streaming videos and books. These recipes are designed for kids 4-8 to make with their guardians as an afterschool or weekend activity, and are always made with natural food. We are also building a line of Murple-branded children culinary products that make it both easy and irresistibly fun to bring kids into the kitchen. With Planet Murple, we make learning to cook real food an experience to look forward to!
Track: Food and Agriculture
Farmview: New Power for Tenant Farmers
In California, just as low-income residents struggle to find affordable housing, farmers also face a cutthroat farmland rental market. If beginning farmers can’t find land for agriculture, then the ‘young farmer movement’ is a pipe dream. In California, 41 percent of all farmland is rented out to others, and new tenants face exorbitant rental prices, lands of poor quality, and predatory leases. There is a tremendous opportunity to leverage emerging data science and geographic information system methods to address the land access issue. In collaboration with California Farmlink, a farming direct service provider, Farmview is a tool that assists beginning farmers in the acquisition of farmland. Farmview combines public data about land ownership with local knowledge contributed by farmers to show farmers the location of available land and its associated attributes. This project will run workshops with farmers in California, conduct user testing, and roll out a statewide tool.
Bug Ideas: Feeding the World With Insects Without Ever Eating Insects
According to the UN Environment Programme, roughly one third of the food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted. Simultaneously, forage fish stocks, which are a key component of the oceanic lifecycle, are declining due to overfishing. They are being harvested to be processed into fishmeal, which feed the aquaculture boom and livestock. Black soldier fly larvae are capable of feeding on waste and efficiently creating both the protein and fat necessary to meet nutritional requirements of feed operations. If a mere 6% of the food waste were converted into bug protein, it would offset 100% of the need for forage fish. The potential for impact is massive. Bug Ideas aims to centralize currently disjointed efforts and expedite FDA approval of insects as feed. The team will accomplish this objective by building a coalition of experts, founding a trade association of companies, and submitting an application for FDA approval.
Unmanned Ground Vehicle for Water Leak Detection
The Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) project is the future of the next generation’s agricultural gadgets. Instead of the past’s archaic methods of manually searching for leaks with acoustic procedures, the UGV project hopes to replace the previous methods with a more strategic appliance – a powerful camera attached onto a fully autonomous vehicle. Utilizing a combination of dynamic image-processing techniques and mobilization, this rover-camera duo is able to autonomously navigate through way-points and detect pipe leaks more frequently, efficiently, and accurately than a field worker would. Powered and guided by the Mission Planner program and the Pixhawk Autopilot System, the rover is capable of decreasing overhead costs, and most importantly, aiding in the preservation of water. The project’s state of the art features are distinguished by its data collection platform, algorithm design, and user-friendly interface.
Ricult
70% of the world’s poor are smallholder farmers, and they produce 80% of the global food. However, these farmers are poor and food insecure. By 2050, the world will need to produce at least 50% more food to feed 9 billion people. This dual-pronged problem of poverty and food insecurity is caused by 3 main issues in agricultural value chains: supply chain inefficiencies, financial exclusion, and information asymmetry. Ricult is solving these issues by establishing a multi-sided, mobile e-commerce platform that fills the holes in the agricultural supply chain by providing farmers direct access to financial instruments, input sellers, end buyers, logistics providers, and real-time crop information. As 80% of the smallholder farmers have access to mobile phones, Ricult’s solution is accessible through both low cost feature phones without Internet connections and smartphones.
Just Ripe
Just Ripe takes serving food to a whole new level. Just Ripe’s products—soups, salads, and smoothies all created from 100% recovered, organic produce — will be pedaled around Oakland’s streets on an innovative, eye-catching food bike. The team aims to hold daily “kickstands,” or food bike sales, at Downtown Oakland tech companies to sell products to young professionals at prices between $6-$10. In addition, Just Ripe will distribute refreshing smoothies to Oakland middle schools and high schools free of charge in order to promote healthy eating while spreading the message: “Don’t DiscriminEAT.” Just Ripe’s food bike allows convenient transportation of products through an innovative, low-cost, mobile, and environmentally-friendly alternative to a food truck. The team’s passion for healthy food and their dedication to making a lasting impact inspired this quirky food bike which aims to initiate a dialogue around food waste and food access in Oakland by “Pedaling with a Purpose.”
Poverty Alleviation through Poultry Education
The One Health Nicaragua team will address food insecurity concerns in Sabana Grande, Nicaragua, by working with children and focusing on improving poultry production. Integrative workshops for students in Sabana Grande will focus on egg production, chick care, coop management, and disease prevention. Local students will manage a demonstration flock providing them the opportunity to gain first-hand experience with effective methods for raising, handling, and vaccinating poultry. Children can then share this information with their family thereby increasing knowledge dissemination throughout the community. Introducing poultry husbandry skills in the classroom will affect changes at the family level and sustainably improve overall community poultry production in Sabana Grande. Ultimately, this will lead to greater food security within the community.
Safi Organics
Safi Organics produces a carbon-negative soil conditioner derived from biomass (farm) waste. Designed for rural smallholder farmers, the soil conditioner leads to a 30% increase in crop yield and 50% increase in income by reversing soil degradation. Biomass waste is present in most rural farms every year after harvest, and yet most of this waste is burned in open air rather than economically utilized because existing capital-intensive and centralized processing technologies often require the long-distance transport of this waste, which is very expensive. Safi Organics has developed patent- pending environmentally-friendly reactors and unique recipes that enable the low-cost and decentralized conversion of waste into carbon-negative soil conditioner in under 2 hours. The company’s EcoCert-certified product is currently used in more than 80 acres of land in Safi Organics’ preliminary pilot project and has generated highly positive customer reviews. In addition, this product actively sequesters 1.5 tons of CO2 per acre into the soil each planting season thereby directly mitigating climate change.
Low Cost Scientific Data Drones for Enhanced Melon Productivity and Security
The SmartMelonDrone project will use low-cost unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) to help manage both the quantity and quality of melon produce. The platform, capable of multispectral imaging, together with image post-analysis software, will support field management, including nitrogen stress detection, water stress detection, pest monitoring, yield estimation, small animal activities, etc. Firstly, real-time imagery with high spatial resolution (centimeters) can be acquired for growing melon by RGB, near infrared (NIR) and thermal infrared (TIR) cameras. Based on this analysis tool, information about nitrogen stress, water stress, and status of crop, weed, insect and disease can be extracted for optimized fertilizer, irrigation, precision application of insecticide, fungicide and herbicide, respectively. Meanwhile, grazing animals are also monitored to prevent introducing pathogenic bacteria into the soil. In addition, pre-harvest and harvest yield estimations will be determined for production decisions.