The problem FarmFairWithTez solves

There are approximately 450–500 million smallholder farmers, or those who work small plots of land for subsistence and to harvest a couple of cash crops. These farmers make up roughly 90% of the world’s farms, and they are the primary example of why better payment systems are needed for small-time farmers in hyper-rural areas making little to no profit from their farms. Small-time farmers’ financial hardships and rural life are exacerbated by yield uncertainty due to unpredictable changes in weather and pest infestations, and studies have shown that these conditions put unsustainable levels of stress on the rural farming population. Depending on the study, farmers may be twice as likely to commit suicide as non-farmers, with an approximate rate of 30 suicides per 100,000 compared with 10 per 100000 for the rest of the population. These figures cannot be separated from economic insecurity, and are a compelling reason why establishing more consistent, faster payment for smallholder farmers across the globe is critical. With blockchain, the agricultural finance process becomes more transparent and fair, yet enables shared fair control accessibility.
We made this possible by deploying our contract, and making use of the powerful Tezos chain and made use of an escrow contract to act as p2p between buyers and farmers and thus eliminating middlemen, in a way in which this app could be trusted by buyers. We also made use of the cryptocurrency Tez(XTZ) as our main payment method (We assume that all the Tez accounts are activated and revealed in the first place) instead of the traditional NetBanking method to save the farmers from the unavoidable exorbitant cuts which are often more than they can afford. Tezos Blockchain ensures transparency and justice for the farmers. We made use of the Cryptonomic Stack for our benefit by using conseilJS to communicate with the tezos blockchain for transferring Tez and checking out the status of the Transactions using the Arronax explorer.

Challenges we ran into

We started with setting up the basic farmer and buyer UI, with an aim to establish a direct peer to peer contact between them by enabling payments through tezos. For payments, we made use of a test tezos faucet to demonstrate the working of it. We were able to get a Keystore containing test values for email, password, pkh, etc, and we used these parameters to call the transaction function of coseiljs, to successfully transfer the mentioned microtez to the receiver (farmers in our case). We made use of the Cryptonomic Stack for our benefit by using conseilJS to communicate with the tezos blockchain for transferring Tez and checking out the status of the Transactions using the Arronax explorer.
It was great fun working with tezos and conseilJS. We initially were not too sure if we would be able to execute transactions on the tezos blockchain but we are glad that we figured it out and can now enable payments using Tezos. We plan to use tezos in our future Dapp endeavors as well, as it is very developer-friendly and is an excellent alternative to ethereum, to deploy smart contracts. We are glad that we could integrate this payment system with our farming Dapp, which we believe is a promising use case of Blockchain. We wanted to improve a lot upon our UI, but took up a lot of time, getting the transactions working. We look forward to more such hackathons and using Tezos in our Dapps!
(Please note that the video attached is a playlist and is a set of two videos. Thanks)