Uzhavan

Farmers grow the food but capture the least of its price. By the time produce reaches a customer it has passed through layers of middlemen, each taking a cut, and the grower is left with whatever's left over. We wanted to see how much of that gap software could close.

The idea was Uzhavan — a platform where farmers list and sell directly, with the produce routed through cold storage instead of a chain of resellers. If we could remove the middle layer, more of the money would land where the work happened.

We built it as a team, Team Learners, and I worked on the React front end — the farmer-facing self-service side where produce gets listed and browsed. It was my first real React project, so I was learning components, state, and the marketplace flow while shipping it.

We leaned on a cold-storage model to keep produce fresh between grower and buyer, and kept the farmer's path deliberately simple — even down to adding products over SMS — because the people using it wouldn't all be sitting at a laptop.

• A React front end for the farmer-facing marketplace and self-service listing.
• A cold-storage-backed model that routes produce around the usual reseller chain.
• A low-friction way to add products — including over SMS — for farmers off the desktop.
• Supporting pages: schemes, educational material, and a produce-price view.

• It aimed to cut the commission that middlemen skim off fresh produce and return that margin to the farmer.
• My first real taste of React and of building something as a team, owning a slice while the whole thing came together.
• Kept on the shelf — the project that taught me component-thinking and why the user's context shapes the design.