The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project involves the areas of risk management, data collection, and participation/growth in the agricultural sector. With the proposed platform, individuals with investment capital will be paired with individuals who have access to infrastructure and management expertise. This will allow small-scale farmers to invest in other farmers to diversify their operations, creating a more reliable income stream and consequently increasing the stability and resilience of small farms, which will greatly benefit the rural economy. Incentivizing these farmers to upload data to improve projection accuracy will result in more robust datasets that can be used to compare and optimize farming practices. The micro-consortia that will be formed will reduce barriers to entry in the agricultural sector by facilitating remote transactions, contracts, and management. This platform could eventually help farmers in developing countries produce agricultural goods with the financial help and expertise of more established farms in the developed world. By increasing participation in agriculture and improving upon current farming practices around the world, this platform can help feed the world's growing population for years to come. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project aims to generate better agricultural decision making and implementation tools by improving upon existing data sets. Massive amounts of data are being collected by farming operations, but that data is often difficult to manage. This project can help farmers utilize this information by providing visual tools to make advanced data analysis and decision-making more intuitive and user-friendly. The feasibility depends on developing an accurate decision support system as well as providing actionable recommendations to incentivize the use of the tools. The goal of the project is to develop the main simulation tool for a decision support platform, along with easy-to-understand visualizations of different investment projections and their impact on income. Finally, users will be given the ability to act upon the recommendations from the analysis immediately and directly from the analysis platform.
