Related work
The design of GeoGardenClub is influenced by other technologies, by the broader landscape of food production and distribution, and finally by potential impacts of climate change. This section provides a recap of our research on these and other issues.
Food security, home gardens, and GGC
Food security, as defined by the United Nations’ Committee on World Food Security, means that all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meets their food preferences and dietary needs for an active and healthy life. In the coming decades, food security will become an increasingly critical issue due to population growth in combination with climate change, the latter of which which will negatively impact agricultural water availability, arable land availability, and the diversity and distribution of agricultural plant, insect, and animal species (Kwasek, 2012).
Food insecurity is not only an issue for the distant future or for underdeveloped countries. In 2019, an estimated 1 in 8 Americans were food insecure, equating to over 38 million Americans, including almost 12 million children (Coleman-Jensen, 2019).
(Galhenia et al, 2013) provides evidence that home gardens can improve food security: "... Benefits of home gardens include enhancing food and nutritional security in many socio-economic and political situations, improving family health and human capacity, empowering women, promoting social justice and equity, and preserving indigenous knowledge and culture." In addition, "the most fundamental social benefit of home gardens stems from their direct contributions to household food security by increasing availability, accessibility, and utilization of food products". According to (Rai, 2020), home gardens can also strengthen numerous ecosystem serviecs, including plant biodiversity, microclimate, water runoff, urban soil restoration, and water quality. Finally, home gardens can play a significant role in combatting "food deserts", areas in which it is difficult to buy affordable or good-quality fresh food (Palar et al., 2019).
Community gardens are similar to home gardens in scale and the types of food products grown, but community gardens create and foster "communities of practice" with significant health consequences: In a study by (Alaimo et al, 2008), community gardeners consumed fruits and vegetables 5.7 times per day, compared with home gardeners (4.6 times per day) and nongardeners (3.9 times per day). Moreover, 56% of community gardeners met national recommendations to consume fruits and vegetables at least 5 times per day, compared with 37% of home gardeners and 25% of nongardeners.
A fundamental goal of Geo Garden Club (GGC) is to address food insecurity by increasing: (a) the numbers of home gardens (and home gardeners), (b) the productivity of home gardens, and (c) the ability of home gardens to improve human health. To accomplish this, we are designing technology to not just facilitate home garden planning and implementation, but also to facilitate the creation of local "communities of practice" for home gardening. If successful, GGC home gardeners will (among other things) reap the health benefits currently enjoyed by community gardeners.
Our target demographic: the "serious" gardener
We view food production as a spectrum of activities and levels of commitment, as shown in the following diagram:
On the far left side are "recreational" gardeners. These are people who are either just getting into gardening, and/or are relatively uncommitted to gardening. There are a variety of technologies (websites and applications) oriented to the needs of "recreational" gardeners.
On the right side are "farmers": those who make most or all of their living from growing food. Unlike gardeners, farmers cannot operate at a loss. There are also a variety of technologies available to support the needs of small scale farmers (i.e. "urban agriculture") as well as large scale farmers ("industrial agriculture").
We call our target demographic the "serious gardener": a gardener who hopes to grow significant amounts of food, to improve their garden on a season-by-season basis, and who is open to sharing their experiences with other gardeners and learning from other gardener's experiences. A serious gardener is not necessarily an "expert" gardener. In fact, one can be both a serious gardener and an absolute beginner! Serious gardeners are defined by intent, not skill level.
Improving a garden from year to year has multiple facets, including:
- Better choice of plant varietals to improve yield or pest/environmental resistance
- Better planning of bed contents (soil/amendments and plant varietals) and sequencing of planting to improve outcomes (yield, flavor, timing of harvest, reduced pests, etc.)
- Better use of resources (i.e. growing season, bed size, water, nutrients)
There are two basic approaches used by a serious gardener to improve their garden:
Individual experimentation and record keeping. A serious gardener tries to learn from their experience over multiple growing seasons. They may keep informal records to provide a more data-driven approach to improvement.
Collective interaction with a "community of practice". Most serious gardeners develop some sort of informal community of fellow-minded gardeners to whom they discuss issues and share experiences in hopes of improving their collective garden experiences. Traditionally, these communities of practice took the form of garden clubs, such as the Garden Club of America. More recently, communities of practice can take the form of local Facebook groups, or even global forums like the Reddit r/vegetablegardening forum. Interaction with others can also increase the enjoyment of gardening and provides motivation.
Interestingly, this classification scheme reveals a technology gap: there is no technology designed to address the needs of gardeners who have more sophisticated goals than recreational gardeners, but who are not interested in running a business based on growing and selling food. Geo Garden Club is targeting this market and technology niche.
The impact of improved garden knowledge
Improving the ability of gardeners to learn effective gardening practices has been shown to facilitate participation in gardening. A study of the socio-behavioral drivers of growing produce at home (Grebitus, 2021) found that knowledge of gardening practices was a significant factor. "...increased knowledge leads to increased participation in home and community gardens. Hence, we need to educate future gardeners, to increase their knowledge and ability to participate safely in small-scale urban agriculture, as stressed by Kortright and Wakefield, who suggested that home food gardeners could be supported with regard to acquiring ecological gardening skills and to general learning opportunities. Lack of knowledge can increase the risk for those who are unaware of safe gardening practices, for example the risk of soil contaminants."
Garden Planning Tools
If you search for "garden planning tools" on the Internet, you'll find dozens of applications. Most of those are essentially "landscape architecture" tools for people who want to design the visual look of their (flower) gardens. This is an interesting design problem, but not the problem addressed by Geo Garden Club.
If you narrow the search to say, "vegetable garden planning tools", you'll still find many that focus on the visual look of the garden bed, but there are a few that focus on the kinds of issues of interest to GGC. Here are the most relevant applications we have found:
| Name/URL | Users | Cost | |
|---|---|---|---|
| GP | Garden Planner | 500K+ | $29-$40/year |
| TS | Territorial Seed | ? | $29-$40/year |
| VP | VegPlotter | ? | Free |
| GPP | Garden Plan Pro | 20K+ | Free version (1 bed), $19.99 one time purchase, $1.99/month subscription |
| GM | Garden Manager | 20K+ | Planner: $0. Coach: $6/mo, Coach+Online Library, webinars, members only chat forum: $7.5/mo |
| GI | Grow It! | 700K | Out of business (?) |
| PM | Plants Map | ? | Free plan, or $49-$99/year |
| SG | Smart Gardener | ? | $10/3 months; $30/year |
| GS | Google Sheets | ? | Free |
Some general observations about garden planning tools:
- Many of these sites focus primarily the needs of "recreational" or "beginner" gardeners, and/or focus on garden construction.
- The social media integration for the some of the apps is questionable. Why "like" a picture of a plant?
- The gardener-to-gardener communication channels are quite primitive, consisting of posting to Facebook or publishing journal entries.
- Most tools have a very limited free tier, with a typical paid subscriber base at $1-$3/month.
- Some tools tend to be underwritten by seed vendors, and so the planning tool is oriented toward marketing and seed sales.
As noted before, a popular tool for serious gardeners is a spreadsheet such as Google Sheets or Excel, perhaps in conjunction with a document editor (Google Docs or Word). This combination of tools is free and very flexible, but lacks any domain-specific functionality.
Urban Agriculture Tools
"Urban Agriculture" is a general term for cultivating, processing, and distributing food in or around urban areas. These tools are distinguished from home garden planner tools by a focus on more professional, market-oriented approach to small-scale farming.
| Name/URL | Users | Cost | |
|---|---|---|---|
| LF | LiteFarm, wiki, github | 1000s | Free, Open Source |
| COG | COG-Pro | ? | $79-$159/year |
| VT | VeggieTables | ? | $89/year + $19/additional user |
| AS | AgSquared SimpleFarm | 1000s | $10/user/month |
| FB | Farmbrite | 1000s | $15-$30/month |
| T | Tend | ? | $30-39/month |
| FS | FarmStatistics | ? | $20/year |
| AD | Agritecture Designer | 120 | $30-80/month |
Some general observations about urban agriculture tools:
- These tools all emphasize (and provide support for) commercial, for-profit farming (albeit on a small scale).
- Several focus on record-keeping required for organic certification.
- Several focus on people management.
- None have mechanisms to share data with neighboring farms.
Citizen Science technologies
There are several tools available to support citizen science as it relates to climate change:
| Name/URL | Users | Cost | |
|---|---|---|---|
| NN | Nature's Notebook | 1000s | Free |
| SF | SmartFin | ? | Free |
Our goal is for GGC to complement existing approaches to Citizen Science. We would like to work with these organizations to determine the best wa for GGC to collect data to augment current data sets and make them more valuable to researchers.
How does GGC fit in?
Analysis of the technology landscape reveals that there are basically two clusters of features: "Novice" features that are associated with the garden planning tools, and "professional" features that are associated with the urban agriculture tools.
The market niche for GGC is between these two areas:
"Beyond Novice". GGC gardeners have generally solved the "layout problem", and are interested in more sophisticated record keeping than is available in current garden planning tools.
"Non-professional". GGC gardeners do not require people management technology. In addition, in a professional setting, local data sharing could be undesirable to farmers as it might reveal competitive secrets. GGC gardeners are in a non-competitive environment where data sharing within the community has little downside.