The problem Operation Agaricus solves

1.Many farmers already complain of being duped on e-retail websites, etc, but due to lack of redressal mechanisms suffer in silence. There are also reports of spawn units cheating farmers by supplying inferior spawns and spores cultures due to lack of a mushroom eco-system across the country. Which standard should industry and entrepreneurs abide by in production of spawns?
Spawns or spores need to be kept at a regulated temperature and for a limited time only, otherwise, they will lose their efficiency to produce mushrooms. The Seed Act does not have jurisdiction here, and no separate act exists that sets these guidelines for mushrooms industry or growers. The modus operandi followed by spawn and compost traders in India is not regularised either. Companies use these to exploit farmers.(Pic 4)
2.Despite a ban on paddy stubble burning, farmers dispose of paddy straw by setting it afire. This is leading to serious environmental consequences that have deleterious impact both on human and soil health. Every winter it metamorphosizes into a crisis when the air in and around NCR turns into a dark cesspool of carbon and nitrous oxide.
It is counterproductive to the farmers' cause. Burning land over and over again runs the risk of destroying all organic matter that makes the soil fertile. So to compensate for the lower yields farmers will eventually be forced to spend increasing sums of money on fertilizers.(Pic 5)
3.Since the mushroom sector is unregulated, there are large fluctuations in prices. Instability in consumption also leads to very high and very low prices of mushroom. Furthermore farmers also get exploited by the distributors who tell them that the market is crashing and ultimately forcing them to sell their cultivation with losses.
This makes farmers reluctant to explore and cultivate mushrooms amongst the fear of losses.(Pic 2)

4. Articles we referred to https://cutt.ly/xkuzPyp https://cutt.ly/TkuzA2S https://cutt.ly/lkuzDTX

Challenges we ran into

1.Unable to use some APIs- We as a team consider making the website as convenient and user friendly as possible, and tried our best to apply Google Cloud Translate API to render the website in multiple languages, and also, Distance Matrix API to inform about the nearest listings from the user’s locations, but both of them being google apis, required a billing account. We instead got a Government Postal API to find the whole address from the user’s pincode and applied backside logic to sort listings based on nearest to farther listings, and have language api as the future scope for now.
2.Integrating node js based backend and ml model- We had some issues in sending data to the ml model in json form. We solved this problem by using python-shell, a very helpful module.
3.Finding suitable dataset to train the ml model- Since mushroom farming is an unexplored sector, it was difficult to find a proper and recent dataset on kaggle around mushroom market prices in India. Due to the 36 hour time limit, it was not possible to create our own dataset.
We even found one dataset of 2020 but were not allowed to download and use it. Hence we had to use the 2013 dataset available on the Government's website.