“Two Central Texas brothers are at it again, cross-breeding farming and technology.
They’ve grown from helping folks farm at home in a box to cultivating a new app to assist you with gardening.
Brothers Luke and Nathan Heath are launching their app called “Smart Garden Assistant” later this month on Earth Day, April 22.
“What we’ve found from our customers is they don’t want to be a master farmer, they just want to enjoy a red tomato,” Nathan said.
“They have this assumption that they have a brown thumb of death and it’s not true, it’s just that they had the wrong information — the correct watering, soil, fertilizing — I mean, there’s a lot of things to know. If you miss a couple of those, you’re going to have a failure,” he said.
The brothers, and Cultivate co-founders, saw a fundamental problem they could solve at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic — growing vegetables at home is hard. Each noticed little to no progress has been made to make it easier for the average folk.
“There’s this huge knowledge gap now because so many people don’t come from agricultural backgrounds,” Nathan said. “[People] would search the internet and find the wrong advice for their area, or worse, find just flat out wrong advice. I knew there had to be a better way,” Nathan said.
Nathan, who sells vegetables to chefs in Austin from his family’s vegetable farm in Central Texas, took his more than 20 years in agriculture and combined it with Luke’s knowledge of developing technology for some of America’s biggest companies.
“[We] started talking and developed the idea of a ‘Smart Garden Assistant,’” Nathan said. “Kind of like having a master farmer in your pocket. There hasn’t been much innovation in home gardening in a long time. We aim to change that.”
View the whole story here: https://www.kxan.com/news/local/austin/central-texas-brothers-develop-app-to-assist-people-with-gardening-at-home/