Daily Harvest Tracker

Hari photographs his mushroom harvest each morning and taps the date away, building an archive strangers can search years later to learn what his farm gives in which month.

Who this is for

Hari is seventy and grows oyster, milky and pink mushrooms in two shade sheds behind his house in Kanakapura, outside Bengaluru. He cuts at half past five, packs into about thirty boxes on a good morning, and sells to eleven restaurants, forty-odd households and a Sunday stall near the bus stand. At six, boxes stacked and hands still damp, he has three minutes before the first pickup arrives. That is the moment.

How the job is done today

Hari keeps a long notebook on a nail in the shed. Date in pencil, weight, sometimes nothing because the pencil went missing. He also sends photos into a WhatsApp group of buyers, where they scroll away by Thursday, and he deletes them from his phone when the storage fills. So when a chef from Indiranagar rings in July and asks whether he had the big pink ones this time last year, Hari flips pages, finds a smudged line that says nothing about colour, and says he thinks so. The chef books elsewhere. Nobody outside that WhatsApp group can see anything at all.

The screens, in order

1. This Morning — One button filling the whole phone that opens the camera the instant Hari touches it, so photographing the day's cut takes no reading and no menus.
2. Which Kind — Three or four large photographs of the mushrooms he actually grows, so he labels the morning by tapping a picture rather than typing a word.
3. How Many Boxes — A short row of big numbers to press so the day carries a rough size, and skipping it is allowed.
4. The Archive — Where anyone who visits scrolls Hari's mornings backwards, month by month, and sees the farm as a run of photographs rather than a price list.
5. One Morning — A single day opened full screen, with the photo large, the date plain, the kind named, and whatever Hari said into it that day.
6. This Month, Other Years — Lets a chef standing in September look at every September Hari has recorded, which is the only question buyers ever really ask.

What it keeps track of

• A Morning — the photo, the date it was taken, which kind, roughly how many boxes, a short spoken note if he left one
• The Kinds He Grows — the name people use, a picture to tap, whether he is still growing it
• What Visitors Looked For — which month they opened, which kind they were after, how many came looking that week

The one decision that matters

How does a morning become searchable. One way is a text box: Hari types pink oyster, second flush, good size, and buyers can search any word. That gives rich search and Hari will use it twice. He is seventy, the keyboard letters are small, and his fingers are wet at six in the morning. The other way is tapping one large picture of the kind, with the date taken automatically. Search then only works on kind and month. Go with the tapped picture. A thin archive that has an entry for every single morning is worth far more than a detailed one with gaps from March onwards, and month plus kind is exactly what a chef asks anyway. Let him add a spoken note if he wants; never require it.

What to leave out of the first version

No orders, no prices, no payments, no customer accounts. The moment buyers can place an order in the app, Hari has to check the app all day, and he will stop opening it. Also leave out weight in kilos. He knows boxes, not grams, and asking him to weigh adds a step at the one minute of the day when a step cannot be added. The archive earns its keep by being complete, not by being a shop.

How you would know it worked

In July a chef rings Hari and says she has been through his photographs from last July, wants the pink ones with the thick stems, and asks when the next flush lands. Hari answers from memory and never reaches for the notebook on the nail.

Build it

Paste this in and let it run.

I grow mushrooms in two sheds behind my house in Kanakapura and I want a phone app where every morning I press one big button, the camera opens straight away, I take one photo of that day's cut, then I tap a large picture of which kind it is, oyster or milky or pink, and that is all, no typing anywhere, because I cannot read small letters without my spectacles and my hands are wet at that hour. Put the date on by itself. Then anyone who buys from me should be able to open the same app and scroll my mornings going back through the years, and pick a month like August and see everything that came out of the shed that August, and see how many boxes there were. Make every letter big enough for me to read at arm's length, and let me speak a few words into a morning instead of writing them.