Benefits Part Two: Data Sovereignty (Equity

research and the feedback from our customer focus group study have shown that people comprehend information in different ways based on their own experiences, which leads to the results being often unsatisfactory and possibly creating more damage than good. I claim that obtaining significant progress in terms of soil (and food system) literacy requires changing people’s hearts and minds. As it happens with any significant change, we need to understand the unique reality of each case and show our ability to help the users be successful, using technology effectively and intelligently.

Governance is perhaps even more important in terms of accelerating blockchain’s benefits. Much of the talk about blockchain has been tightly focused on DLT traceability and less concerned with governance, but we need these parts to work together to achieve measurable addedvalue. This new ecosystem governance must incentivise all stakeholders by making them shareholders, and our hybrid model would allow for the governance of community-driven decisions and quorum for voting, which may incentivise more comprehensive engagement in soil literacy. This is filtered by using decentralised access (i.e., token membership) to participate in that community, and where the permissioned custodian agent makes the technical changes for the ecosystem. Perhaps then, will organisations be able to collaborate in a way that will deliver optimum output in a viable economic model. Using bottom-up solutions with a blockchain-backed model for access and financial inclusion using shared data that aligns to an agriculture cooperative’s governance, embeds trust and further incentivises collaboration in an ecosystem. As a result, the DSFH organisation aims to be a nonprofit entity that would sit in between the consortium governance of partners in academia, start-ups, SMEs, enterprise, and public organisations looking to build an open-source agricultural and food system digital overview, brokering trust, and creating an inclusive governance system.

Benefits Part Two: Data Sovereignty (Equity)

The most pressing question that appears to weigh down much of the innovation and adoption of technology is around who owns the data? Data sovereignty is, or should be, integral to every aspect of decision-making by public and private organisations and individuals. Availability of verified, transparent, and accurate data can make or break a user’s capacity to make robust decisions that guarantee their quality of life and security, as well as opportunities for equity (Figure 13).