Meet AgriLink

Why we built AgriLink

Regional food supply chains in northwest Kansas are still built on phone calls, paper invoices, and long-haul middlemen. A head of lettuce grown twenty miles from a school cafeteria can end up traveling hundreds of miles through distributors before it ever reaches a kid's lunch tray.

We wanted to prove that the same region that grows the food can also move it — efficiently, transparently, and on the farmer's terms. AgriLink exists to replace that outdated logistics stack with a single, high-tech marketplace where farmers manage inventory at scale and buyers source directly, with real-time visibility into price, quantity, harvest date, and delivery distance.

And because this was a hackathon project, we also wanted to demonstrate that a small team can ship a secure, end-to-end platform — account management with optional 2FA, farm and listing CRUD, a buyer-facing search experience, and a route preview for food miles — in a single sprint.

What makes AgriLink different

• Direct-to-buyer by default. Most farm marketplaces still route orders through a distributor or a regional aggregator. AgriLink is built so a school district and a farm sign up as peers, not through a third party.
• Farmer-owned accounts with real security.We treat each farmer's account like any other professional system — usernames, bcrypt-hashed passwords, optional TOTP two-factor authentication — not just an email signup form.
• Transparent, structured listings. Every crop listing is linked to a verified farm on the platform, with coordinates, acreage, harvest dates, and pricing — so buyers know exactly where their food is coming from and when.
• Route-aware delivery previews. Every buyer product page shows a haversine-based delivery preview between the farm and the destination, so food miles are visible and local sourcing stays front and center.
• Built on a modern, well-typed stack.A TypeScript-first Next.js 16 frontend talks to a NestJS backend with class-validator DTOs and full Swagger documentation — the platform isn't just a demo, it's built like something you could actually deploy.
• Northwest Kansas first. Most national marketplaces flatten regional differences. AgriLink is deliberately narrow: we care about the producers around Hutchinson, Salina, and Dodge City, and the schools, restaurants, and co-ops buying from them.