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Apply HN: Niche social-network for farmers, plants, their uses, seeds exchange

23 points by alisson ↗ HN
I felt in love with a agriculture movement called agroforestry and I've being learning and practicing it for the past year and a half, also I've being practicing a vegan raw food diet and this together brings me so make questions when I see a plant species:

- What species is it? - Is it edible? What parts? - Can I eat it raw? Or just cooked?

There are SO many leafs we could eat and most people think it is just weed, we call then here PANCs (Plantas Alimenticias Não Convencionais / Unconventional Food Plants). We can crowdsource this kind of information.

The beauty in PANCs is that they usually don't need fertilizers neither pesticides thanks to their rusticity, but:

- Where can I buy them to consume? - Where can I find seeds or seedlings so I can produce?

Maybe someone near me have a plant and wants to sell/give it away. It would be a nice opportunity to connect farmers in so many ways other than that.

Plants are not just edible, most are medicinal too and I've cured so many things with plants that I'd love to see a more organized way to browser their medicinal uses too. I've some good books on it but books are difficult to browse, to carry around and miss a lot of information specially on local species that today just some elderly knows. So we crowdsource medicinal uses too. But how to trust this kind of information without scientific studies on the specie?

We can crowdsource all those the questions.

I see a really engaged community of plant identification and seeds exchange on Facebook even though they work it could be a lot more organized and with better engagement with some gamification.

I'm Brazilian so I'm taking more about my reality here, but this kind of platform could benefit people around the world and maybe help with food crises.

10 comments

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rkho
I'm a big fan of Facebook groups and the communities they foster. One of the best things about it is a relatively low barrier to entry: You click the "join" button. A lot of people already have Facebook accounts, and this familiarity with the service makes it simpler to use.

I'm wondering what kinds of features could convince communities to switch from their known quantity of Facebook groups over to this service?

alisson
I couldn't agree more.

Facebook is great but is really generic, I think each community has its own needs. On my project as an example if somebody post an image of a plant species asking people to help identify it, then the image would be indexed on the Plant's page increasing the number of images of that specie. Eventually when we have a great number of different images we can better train an algorithm to identify/suggest species automatically. The navigation and content organization will meet the community's needs.

jay_kyburz
Great idea. I met a bloke at dinner last week who was putting together a website that would allow people who grow veggies in their suburban gardens to post what they have ready to eat for trade and or sale. Perhaps this could be a part of what you are building.
aacook
Interesting idea. I really like the idea of a seed exchange. What Monsanto and others are doing with seed distribution is alarming.
kumarski
Falling Fruit does something similar check them out.
kumarski
Ooops. Ela beat me to the punch.
pjlegato
How will you get the initial user base and overcome the "ghost town effect"?

This is the major problem for any social network / site. Nobody will use it unless they see that many others are already using it.

What's your plan for reaching a critical mass of users before you run out of money to operate and develop the site?