Hancock Students Help With New Food & Wine App
MARCH 25, 2024-- Santa Barbara County residents will be able to easily find local farms, wineries, vineyards, and farmers markets thanks to a new app developed through Allan Hancock College’s agriculture and viticulture programs with help from the college’s students.
AgriDiscovery is a new interactive mobile app that allows visitors and residents to explore vegetables, fruits, honey, flowers, wine and other agricultural products made and grown in Santa Barbara County, and the locations where they can buy them. The free app also allows users to filter their searches based on farming practices such as organic, regenerative, and sustainable.
“This new app will help improve the community’s knowledge and understanding of farming, food, and wine in our region, and connect them with the people who grow and produce these crops and wines,” said Hancock viticulture and enology instructor Alfredo Koch. “This will also help the county’s growers and winemakers by increasing awareness of their businesses and products.”
Students from Hancock’s viticulture and agriculture programs assisted with the development of the app by contacting and gathering information for more than 100 wineries, farms, and farmers' markets currently included in the app. Koch said the number will continue to grow as students help bring more businesses onto the app.
“There was a lot of data and information that needed to be collected from these businesses, and our students were willing to get out there, connect with these growers, and make sure the information we included was correct and accurate,” said Koch.
The AgriDiscovery app is free to all and currently available for download from the App Store for Apple devices and on Google Play for Android devices.
Funding for the project was made possible by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Agricultural Marketing Service Agricultural Marketing Service through grant AM22SCBPCA1133. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the USDA.
