Hello! We are TerraShift, an all-girls, ethnically diverse team passionate about STEM and entrepreneurship. We are working towards eradicating agricultural poverty and global hunger through Project RevGro, an affordable, eco-friendly mechanical device designed to improve the work efficiency of farmers by reducing manual labour whilst increasing crop yields.
About Us:
We are four best friends based in the UK on a mission to make the world a better and more equal place, where no one will ever go to bed hungry, or lay awake at night worrying about their source of income. Whilst we advertise ourselves as a group of misfits budding engineers, we are really three aspiring engineers and one medic (although goodness knows why Sophie wants to go into medicine!) When we’re not working on our project, we enjoy chatting about F1, musical theatre and films!
Our #beapirate Challenge Journey:
After stumbling upon the challenge on Instagram, we decided to sign up, not knowing what we had in store for us. To be honest, when the challenge officially began on June 1st, we were expecting more information on what we were tasked to do. However, the Moonshot Pirates Crew let the reins loose and encouraged all pirates to let our imaginations run wild. The first week of the challenge consisted of the four of us collectively brainstorming various problems that we felt passionate about, but there were so many! In fact, we changed our project idea several times before landing on an issue we felt we could genuinely tackle…FOOD! As avid food-lovers, we knew how privileged we were to be able to grab a meal whenever we felt peckish, because so many people around the world do not have that luxury due to socioeconomic reasons. We decided that every person deserved the basic human need of easy access to nutritious food. Whilst we acknowledged that food waste is also a huge issue, we discovered through our research that food insecurity is not only caused by inadequate food distribution, but also food scarcity in the poorest countries. Since, as a team, we had little coding ability and even less knowledge about exponential technologies such as AR and VR, we decided to stick with what we knew best – mechanics!
Over the next couple of weeks, we had the amazing opportunity of speaking with five mentors who helped us develop our brand, business model, marketing strategies and pitch. As with all entrepreneurial journeys, we faced times when we thought we weren’t going to meet a certain milestone, or that our solution was not as feasible or impactful as those of the other teams. However, we told ourselves that the end goal wasn’t to win a competition, but rather to utilise the resources we have and see just how far we could take our idea. From then on, our journey was really all about absorbing as much insightful knowledge that our mentors had given us as possible and taking every step as a learning curve to aid our future endeavours with our project idea – all the whilst having lots of fun!
Although we have just been raving on about all the cool things we learnt during this process, we have to say…the #beapirate challenge was seriously addictive fun! From the ideation to the voting fiasco, from the social media marketing to the finals live pitch, we enjoyed every minute of this challenge (including facetiming until 4am doing research together!) We are incredibly grateful to our families and friends who voted every day to get us into the finals, to our insanely talented mentors who taught us various ins and outs of the entrepreneurship trade, to our fellow pirates who we have had the honour of competing and making friends with, and, of course, our Moonshot Pirates Crew for setting up this challenge, and, in doing so, giving us the confidence to run with our ideas and empowering us to dream big!
The Top Three Things We Have Learnt:
1. Never give up
2. Create a great idea and just run with it!
3. Dare to dream big
Our Vision:
So, we’ve won the #beapirate challenge 2020, what’s next? We are currently contacting engineering professionals as well as building our network in our target countries in Africa to finalise our RevGro designs and get started with manufacturing our prototypes! We hope to deploy sixty prototypes in our target countries to begin pilot testing by the end of summer 2021. Our ultimate goal is to set up our own NGO to provide support to subsistence farmers by distributing RevGro, teaching regenerative farming techniques as well as ways of expanding their agricultural businesses.
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