2018 - 2020
Trading Platform for Specialty Crops
Key Accomplishments
- Designed and developed a hybrid trading platform and seller marketplace that supported futures contracts, and product delivery.
- Developed a crop production tool for growers that integrated with the marketplace, helping market participants estimate future supply.
- Led a team of four engineers to deliver a minimum viable product (MVP) in just ten months.
What was OsoVega?
OsoVega was an online marketplace where specialty growers and consumer-packaged-goods companies could buy and sell specialty agricultural crops. The platform prioritized helping growers to grade their crops and obtain the best possible prices, while also enabling buyers to purchase sufficient quantities to fulfill demand profitably.
Bridging the Gap Between Growers and Buyers
Our solution was a multi-sided marketplace. For the buyer side of the marketplace, a key problem is the need for a consistent supply at a predictable price. This is critical to maintaining margins and satisfying contracts with big retailers like Whole Foods.
For the growers, who were the sellers on the marketplace, two analogies became apparent. First, growers are conditioned to lock in a price for their crop based on the movement of futures prices. Second, when growing a new crop, growers may require support with farming practices, farm inputs, and harvesting.
Osovega — Wireframes illustrating harvest planning and the grower's sell-side interface.
Growers Dashboard
We opted for a hybrid e-commerce style interface that took inspiration from Amazon's seller site. Growers could list their products and set a fixed price or set a price range that they were willing to consider. Although we were not authorized to act as a Market Maker in the regulatory sense, we hired agents to connect with buyers and assist in facilitating the transaction all the way to delivery.
Predicting Crop Production
In low volume markets, the spot price of goods can vary wildly, making it difficult to ensure a consistent supply. To address this challenge, we developed a farm production tool that helped growers - and the marketplace as a whole - predict the volume of crops likely to be available in a given growing season.
Osovega — Wireframe illustrating farm production tool with harvest prediction.
The production app tracked inputs and estimated yields based on feedback from specialists who visited the farms. This information helped growers plan their harvest and production schedules, as well as provide buyers with a more reliable estimate of future supply.
Technology
We chose to use C# DotNet and Postgres for the backend of the trading marketplace. The DotNet ecosystem for integrations and the language level compiler guarantees made sense in the context of this product. A series of Restful APIs exposed the backend service.
For the farm production app, we decided to use Python with FastAPI for the backend. This application was primarily focused on CRUD operations with integrations to weather stations, drone data, and other sources. Python's flexibility and speed allowed us to deliver this part of the application quickly.
We chose a monolithic frontend application all written in Vue. This approach provided a seamless user experience for growers and allowed us to easily integrate marketplace data with production data coming from the fields.