One evening I was looking at Copernicus satellite data and thought: could I turn NDVI imagery and weather data into something useful for the farmers I grew up with? That turned into months of evenings and weekends.

What it does: Guardia del Campo combines satellite imagery (Sentinel-2 NDVI, soil moisture), weather data (Open-Meteo, ARPA Campania), and ML models trained on local varieties to produce daily risk forecasts for downy mildew, powdery mildew, olive fly, frost, and heat stress. Every morning, a Gemini AI brief tells farmers what to do — in plain Italian. No "probability coefficient." Just: "humidity is high, check the vines for peronospora today."

The part I'm most proud of: anonymous crowdsourced reporting. A farmer spots disease, taps three buttons, every grower within 10km gets an alert. No account, no login, no personal data. Works offline, syncs when connectivity returns. Stack: Next.js + Vercel (dashboard + cron jobs for ML pipeline), Supabase (Postgres + Edge Functions), Python/scikit-learn (daily-retrained SGD models), Gemini API (Italian agronomic briefs), Capacitor (wraps the web app as native Android — same codebase, Play Store, native push). Capacitor over React Native because the entire product is a web app. No rewrite needed.

Cold-start problem: Crowdsourced reporting only works if farmers report. My approach: personal emails in Italian to local producers. No marketing speak. Just: "I built this, it's free, try one report next time you're in the vineyard." Being honest about the rough interface actually helped — farmers appreciated someone not trying to sell them something. The data moat: Every photo a farmer uploads becomes training data for the community's diagnostic model. After 2-3 seasons with 200+ farms, this creates a phytopathological dataset specific to Sannio varieties and microclimate. No big AgTech company can replicate this without years of local presence.

The real product isn't the app — it's the dataset. Economics: Revenue: €0, by design. Cost: ~€80/month (Vercel, Supabase, Gemini API). Monetization kills trust when you have 0 users.

What's next: Vendemmia 2026 pilot with 20-30 farms.

Web: https://guardia.sann.io/campo Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.guardiasannio.campo