the Data-smart Farmhand 2020

the Data-smart Farmhand 1. A food system database platform to record, fetch and maintain verifiable, transparent and real-time minimal viable data, and harmonized-standardized ontology to create an information fingerprint for each product.

2. An inclusive ecosystem governance model to incentivise significant and sustainable value for all stakeholder, where its deliverables are verified by the immutability of a blockchain.

3. An innovation model to empower stakeholders as shareholders to ‘stay relevant’, considering trust relationships are complex and potentially stronger than any technology solution in isolation.

Table of Contents OVERVIEW ......................................................................................3 The Challenge Today ........................................................................................................... 3 Demystifying Blockchain Solutions ..................................................................................... 7 Food System Database ........................................................................................................ 8 Inclusive Ecosystem Governance ........................................................................................ 9 Stay Relevant Integration.................................................................................................... 9

TRANSFORMATION OF THE FOOD SYSTEM MODEL ....................... 15 Introducing the Data Smart Farmhand Platform: Soil Fingerprint................................... 16 Soil and Agriculture First Mile Needs................................................................................ 17 European Producers and Cooperatives............................................................................. 19 Smart Farming and Data Sovereignty – Who owns the data? ......................................... 21

OUR 40%|60% VALUE SOLUTIONS ................................................ 23 Solutions ............................................................................................................................ 23 40% Transactional ............................................................................................................. 23 1. Product: Data Smart Farmhand Platform: Soil Fingerprint .......................................23 2. Service: Business model relevance analysis and consulting ......................................27 60% Advocacy .................................................................................................................... 28 3. Food System Transformation Narrative .....................................................................28 Development Roadmap .................................................................................................... 29 Business Model Canvas ..................................................................................................... 30

EXPECTED IMPACT OF THE DATA-SMART FARMHAND .................. 33 Soil Information Fingerprint | Data-smart Farmhand Platform....................................... 33 Personal Motivation: Value of Transparency - Do Good Do Well. ................................... 38

ABOUT AUTHOR ........................................................................... 39 WORK CITATIONS ......................................................................... 40 The following white paper was authored by Brian Heinen.

To the best of our knowledge and understanding no information contained in this document (the “White Paper”) is untrue, misleading or otherwise inaccurate and that the White Paper makes no omission likely to affect its import. The White Paper also contains information that is derived from third party sources that we believe to be reliable and is given in good faith, but no warranties or guarantees or representations are made with regard to the accuracy, completeness or suitability of any third-party information presented. As far as possible, we have referred to the original source of this type of information in the endnotes. Receiving this document give no ownership of, or rights for redistribution or republication of information here within without written permission of the author, Brian Heinen.

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Overview OVERVIEW The Challenge Today It is a massive challenge to satisfy a growing population’s demand for goods, services, energy and food. To fulfil these demands, while preserving the environment and protecting individual well-being, requires committed and sustainable use of resources, talent and collaboration among all stakeholders. Subsequently, to meet this challenge, all stakeholders must be incentivized to communicate knowledge and shared access to better supplies, services and an inclusive network, which allows all partners to be justly engaged and compensated.

To make this possible, it is crucial that the entire community, whether they be an individual, start-up, small or medium size enterprise (SME), large multinational, non-governmental organization (NGO), university, or government, take a fresh look at questions around our values, how to organize all stakeholders in an interconnected and diverse world, share cleaner data, and incentivize partners to further build ecosystem relationships that achieve doubleand triple-bottom-line returns (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Sustainable Development Goals (United Nations, 2015)

In the history of domesticated agriculture, have we ever had so many resources, data and new contributors in pursuant to the goals to feed the entire world a healthy and sustainable diet?

It is clear that to feed a global population of eight billion people in 2020 a healthy and sustainable diet, and one billion more people expected by 2030, the Agri-Food industry needs to reconsider the many keys parts of the food system, but certainly, people and transparency should be the focus (United Nations, 2015).

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The food system has robust and complex supply chains generating an enormous amount of data and opportunity. Worldwide, agriculture is the single largest employer with 40% of global population (over one billion farmers) on five million farms, of which 85% are smallscale farms. It is worth noting that the agricultural labor force is comprised of 43% woman across the world (Raney et al, 2011) (United Nations, 2017) (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Female producer (Common Usage, 2019)

Greater transparency of supply chain transactions would benefit the conversation about global interconnectivity and expose where the utility falls short of expectations. Increased supply chain transparency would increase consumer confidence, improve chain security, and incentivize cleaner data collection and industry standards.

Some argue that Blockchain can be the key to help simplify these conversations about supply chain transactions and embed transparency across the food system. Developing transparency with a standardized food system database of harmonized relevant information built on the blockchain can remedy doubts, misalignments or prove to be a deterrent for nefarious actions or miscalculations from even the most competent partners (Figure 3).

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Figure 3: Blockchain Added Value #1 (Reuters, 2019)

Potentially, the greatest promise for integrating blockchain is in the opportunity to transform the broadly defined farm-to-mouth value chain with an inclusive ecosystem governance. This opportunity expands beyond typical supply chain traceability activities to include any direct or indirect stakeholder with relation to the way that food is grown, processed, shipped, handled, sold, researched and eaten. This is consequential, as we consider how to transform into a more sustainable circular economy, which in the next twenty years could bring about the most profound achievements in the food system value chain. Namely, blockchain backed solutions which result in delivering more nutritional products, reducing food loss and waste, and improving environmental and individual data sovereignty impacts.

In addition, stakeholders face additional challenges when the actual exchange of information involves transferring or giving access to data, adopting a new technology and business strategy. These challenges can be due to privacy concerns, regulation issues, and the typical fears and resistance of adoption, even if this happens at the expense of productivity and competitiveness. Although we live in an era of collaboration, constant exchange and cocreation, the perception still exists that the one who owns the access to information is in control. At the moment, intermediaries across the supply chain have power to shape this exchange of information. The ability of intermediaries to stay relevant in the adoption strategies of new technology will be critical in leveraging their diminishing position of power as a trust agent.

The solution to misalignments of trust and adoption short comings requires reinventing and transforming the food system model with all parties incentivized from a bottom-up and human-centric perspective. In the end, it is most important to remember that adoption of any

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technology will depend on the humans using it, so how one relates to people’s intrinsic and extrinsic needs will go a long way in determining a successful adoption.

Figure 4: How blockchain companies market themselves (unknown, 2019)

The Data-smart Farmhand framework is based on the need for a systemwide database product and inclusive ecosystem overhaul towards transforming the food system model.

However, while many Blockchain projects are offering the world to users (Figure 4), I argue to first segment the value chain into parts and to build a user friendly database product and marketplace ecosystem that would focus on achieving measurable added value for a part specifically and then move onto a new section as the platform finds success. And, importantly, to develop each section with a vision of future interoperability and within a standard of utility that allows us to scale up the Data-smart Farmhand platform and marketplace ecosystem to include the entire food system later.

Therefore, the first part of the Data-smart Farmhand Platform discussed in this proposal is the Soil Information Fingerprint (40%) and Transforming the Food System Model (60%), starting with soil information.

But how does it work that blockchain is the key to facilitate this transformation into a circular economy for the food system? This question needs to be addressed more thoroughly in the following sections, but the answer will lead towards how we feed the entire world a healthy and sustainable diet!

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Demystifying Blockchain Solutions First, let’s concede what blockchain is not in relation to the food system.

Figure 5: Dilbert (Adams, 1999)

Blockchain is not a panacea for solving all food system business problems in our world, despite the overwhelming hype that you may have seen in the last couple years (Figure 5). A blockchain is ultimately just a ledger, though with immutability, and ledgers have been around perhaps only several thousand years less than domesticated agriculture has been around.

Blockchain, never the less, is a mechanism that is most promising in terms of evolving much of the same technology that has already existed in our food system (and other areas of life).

This new mechanism works by allowing the integration of technology, such as Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, to smart contracts, on top of a blockchain architecture, which achieves transparent, traceable and real-time decentralized management of data and financial transactions (Figure 6).

Figure 6: Blockchain Value Added #2

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Food System Database But let’s take a step back and consider how that would work. One of the most important impacts of a blockchain-based food system model, is that it can abstract away questions about trustworthiness in transactions, if applied correctly. The blockchain mechanism functions through cryptographic hashing of data onto the digital database (ledger), which makes it possible to publish data in various formats and control access to this data, while offering the guarantee of immutability. Each stakeholder will have their own unique cryptographicencoded key that guarantees access to incorruptible information and its history as it was originally recorded onto the blockchain ledger. (Reference page 24 for further explanation about technical aspects of this blockchain integration.)

As a result of having the details of a transaction automatedly hashed onto the blockchain, all of the substantial human effort and money that was previously invested in brokering old transactional trust across a value chain, and validating each other’s deliverables throughout the supply chain, can now be re-applied into building a more inclusive and secure ecosystem.

A collaboration ecosystem in which ownership is democratized through the issuance of tokens and which blockchain’s inherent immutability creates the validation of deliverables that today bogs down commerce. Blockchain immutability can be a mechanism to deliver increased transparency by verifying a product providence and ground truth data to all stakeholders and confidently relay feedback back upstream to producers and suppliers.

There are huge packets of existing food system data, but they need to be more organized and readily accessible to allow users to confidently track production timeliness and product conditions in real time. To allow all users to seamlessly respond to market demands, manage environmental compliance and IP protection, and pinpointing where any problems that lead to fraud, corruption or loss of value may occur (Figure 7).

Source: http://www.fao.org/save-food/resources/keyfindings/en/

Figure 7: Food Waste and Loss (FAO, 2019)

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Furthermore, there is concurrent information such as soil moisture, plant density, and harvest techniques which are not being given the attention they need because either relevant data is not available at scale or experimental data is missing. More effort is needed to collect data to combat food loss and waste and to reduce the effects of fertilizers and pesticides, which have shown to lead to leaching of soil and greater greenhouse gas emissions (Walter et al, 2017).

Inclusive Ecosystem Governance Importantly, the blockchain mechanism effectively democratizes the ownership of an ecosystem, which further empowers transparent collaboration between stakeholders. In effect, integrating a blockchain mechanism shoulders the burden of trust, freeing stakeholders to confidently collaborate on solutions with one another. As opposed to talking past each other or trying to innovate behind closed doors. Stakeholders would be incentivized to comprehend, accelerate and build new technology together. And the organization(s) who is building or already owns this ecosystem would become more the custodian of that ecosystem. As a result, they would lead the focus on finding solutions to create more engagement using the utility of the token, which in turn would help all stakeholders produce healthier food and make more profit, but with less loss and waste and negative environmental impact.

New Technology + Old Business Model = Expensive Old Organizations New Technology + Empowered Community = Successful Adoption Figure 8: Blockchain Added Value – Empowered Community

It is transformative that the ecosystem access is safely democratized by a publicly issued token. The token gives all in possession (shareholders) of it access to the technical functionality of the platform; thus, empowering all stakeholders to create their own transactional relationships in the ecosystem marketplace and an opportunity to serve their needs (if they so desire) to build their own proprietary functionality on top of the existing platform’s technology. As well, this public token ownership is the mechanism which allows stakeholders to become ecosystem shareholders (ownership). This new model allows stakeholders to build a transparent governance for access and financial inclusion in the ecosystem by encouraging the value of sharing and working more closely together to create successful adoption (Figure 8).

Stay Relevant Integration In general, industries are experiencing periods of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA) as our global networks continue to expand. The food system needs consistency in good practices and trust between stakeholder, the lack of which has resulted

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in serious damages to the producers and the output involved, both in terms of results and reputation. When the relationship between input suppliers, distributors and wholesalers is not at its best, and excludes the producers almost all together, the usage of technology and information exchange rarely happens efficiently, leading to parties blocking adoption, or blaming each other. It is clear that stakeholders and intermediaries might resist the adoption of technology and the exchange of data involved based on concerns that their business could be taken over from other competing providers.

To make matters worse, the understanding of blockchain normally comes with the expectation of a technology being for disintermediation, which eliminates the need for a middle person or organization. And therefore, can cause stakeholders to resist making the efforts to transition in fears of losing their jobs. It is not surprising many initiatives do not succeed in achieving the expected results and gain adoption.

Technology, like any tool, is meant to be used in a particular way to gain optimal benefits from its use, while minimising any negative impact to the environment or community. Any change requires a thorough understanding of each key stakeholder’s reality to ensure a successful adoption of an innovation. In a multi-layer business relationship, one where organisations collaborate or are involved in the delivery of technology, the process of adoption can be complex for two reasons. First, it depends on every stakeholder having the tools and know-how to work with the technology correctly. The second reason is more subtle, organizations must be willing to capture, comprehend and share relevant information. Thus, stakeholder concerns of trustworthiness or perceived risks of adoption must be addressed so that each stakeholder understands the value of accepting the technology for their purposes.

Communication is key to addressing these adoption issues and to maximise the performance of any technology. Communication includes capturing and sharing relevant information about its utility, the way partners should use the technology, and the optimal environments in which to operate it. Sharing information helps all partners to understand actual performance, identify risks, react to unexpected conditions, or provide real-time feedback to improve the design and how best to adopt a technology to a company’s practices.

In the many instances, an organization’s adoption strategy for any new technology relied on the hope that all stakeholders would understand a theoretical Return on Investment (ROI) and therefore be willing to dedicate the resources to learn and implement the new technology. But this has been a risky approach, which has relied on too many assumptions, as it expects all stakeholders to fully cooperate based on a general perceived need of the technology. Often times, the new technology can be perceived by partners to be a top-down dictated adoption strategy. Reality proves that stakeholder cooperation does not always happen for many expected and unexpected reasons, which leads to situations where partners reject the technology and its adoption.

Organizations expect stakeholders to learn their new way of working and dedicate themselves to following the narrow training provided for it. But different stakeholders have different realities, so different approaches are needed to introduce an innovation and have it accepted.

Part of the reason involves culture and working styles, different partners will handle information in different ways based on their expertise, goals, or they may want to focus on

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their own way of doing things. A one-size-fits-all approach to integrating technology into various markets will most likely lead to resistance and misalignment from stakeholders based on their context, local market conditions, emotions, skills and knowledge, leading to the need for a unique strategy of doing things each time.

Partners may not be willing to exchange information based on lack of understanding, misinformation, or lack of trust. The reasons vary for why any of them would mistrust the existing ecosystem. Sometimes the mistrust is a lack of belief in the technology, product or services, and what it does. The rest of the issues normally appear from a lack of confidence on how this collaboration is going to affect their business, which could compromise the perception of what value it provides, or the importance of the role they play in the process.

Saying that, in the current centralized business model, an organization dedicates an enormous amount of effort to broker ‘transactional trust’. Trust gained through people validating each partner’s deliverables being ‘pushed’ up the supply chain (Figure 9).

Therefore, to reduce their risks of miscommunication and lack of trust, organisations rely on a network of local distributors and wholesaler intermediaries (Trust Agents) to engage with local customers and deliver the best possible experience. But with a mark-up for each deliverable at each step along the chain.

Figure 9: Current Push Model

For the same reasons, most innovation is based on relationships built within the silos of a closed network of trusted partners. These closed networks rely on many of the same intermediaries to broker trust between silos and as a result of this costly effort, these networks often restrict outside stakeholders’ access to valuable research, which leads to waste and redundancy throughout the ecosystem.

This intermediary business model originated many years ago but their validity today is sometimes unclear. In a world where innovation allows direct communication, exchange of information, goods and payments, partners are often questioning the value of these

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intermediaries. Constantly, these intermediaries are looking for ways to justify their existence and find ways to provide new value.

Now days, the food system landscape is aiming to transform from this siloed, push business model dominated by intermediaries, towards a circular and demand-pull model, which will incentivize further open innovation across the value chain. But the current landscape is fixed in traditional roles and this transformation is only just starting to gain traction.

Figure 10: The importance of understanding the actor to create an enhanced production and information exchange model

In the current model, input suppliers and retail companies are too robust and struggle to change their centralized and zero summed transactional business models into a more circular model. However, they can bring a stable platform, financing, infrastructure and testing grounds for innovative solutions (Figure 10).

Start-ups companies are agile enough to disrupt and evolve the current model, to demonstrate added value for input suppliers, distributors and producers, and with less threat to all stakeholders. But they have little leverage to transform the food system in isolation.

Producers (i.e. farmers) just want someone to demonstrate to them that a technology works, what benefit it brings, and how it is going to be paid for. Producers are always looking for an advantage to improve their razor-thin margins and leverage in their market.

Distributors and Wholesalers are the intermediaries that the channel infrastructure revolves around and they hold a lot of influence in most markets. But their position as an intermediary is weakening as the food system further adopts into an automated driven ecosystem, one in which direct contact with all parties is possible without the involvement of these intermediaries. For now, they have a lot of power, but for how long?

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Customers and consumers believe they have more power than they actually do and they are motivated by more than just price points, such as environmental sustainability and nutritional value. However, information they share with the system is often unreliable and their own beliefs are rarely challenged or tested against evidence-based research.

With Blockchain, ownership of the food system is democratized with a token to give all these stakeholders access to the platform and its technology, so they can create their own transactional relationship. The organization(s) that created the platform are incentivized less by a stakeholders’ profit margins in these transactional relationships, but more incentivized by creating velocity (usage of the token) across this platform (Figure 11). Therefore, they are motivated to focus on building a better user experience (UX), more products and services of secure and verifiable use across the platform. Importantly, this means innovation and the incentives to innovate can come from all stakeholders and is the basis to measure success across the entire model.

Figure 11: Transformative Model with Blockchain

There are enormous needs for this new collaborative mindset. Partners can capitalize from their own contributions, improve quality control and incentivize connectivity. Whereas any stakeholder stands to gain from transforming the system to be inclusive for everyone (further velocity), and all this can be done without losing competitive advantage or regulatory control.

Trust is a fundamental currency for business value. Importantly, transparency and good behaviour are critical aspects for attracting both partners and talent at a time when open collaboration and co-creation seem critical to address both social and business challenges.

Which is why I argue that the key to the success of a blockchain platform and a circular economy is a strategy to empower intermediaries to ‘stay relevant’ as the Trust Agents in its adoption.

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Figure 12: Automation on Steroids (Common Usage, 2019)

Blockchain is not going to make the roles of food system intermediaries obsolete (Figure 12), automation is doing that. Hence, intermediaries should leverage their current power, while they still have it, to onboard and align their customers into a token-based, blockchain ecosystem. Intermediary can stay relevant by using their trust networks to lead the adoption of the platform and its technology, and demonstrate how to build value using the ecosystem token. This way, intermediaries have a channel to stay relevant in the relationships between both suppliers and customers and are rewarded for their efforts with tokens of share of value, which will only increase with further adoption velocity on the platform. On page 22, you can read how producers will also be similarly rewarded for their engagement in the platform.

The following section will describe in more detail the pertinent factors in regards to the adoption of a food system database and inclusive governance, and which motivating metrics have been identified to measure how we have achieved the goals of the Data-smart Farmhand platform and Soil Information Fingerprint.

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Transformation of the FOOD SYSTEM TRANSFORMATION OF THE FOOD SYSTEMModel MODEL “

Eating is an agricultural act – Wendell Berry: farmer, poet, author and activist

Figure 13: The Pleasures of Eating (Berry 1990)

Above is a statement of individual empowerment (Figure 11), because it seems to suggest that every time we make choices about what we eat and who we purchase products from, we are voting on the direction in which we want our food system to move. Importantly, from the farmers to the consumer’s perspective, the journey from farmgate to the Point-of-Sale (PoS) and into their home needs be more transparent, secure and inclusive (Berry, 1990).

Across the food system journey, there is incredible potential and unlimited opportunities to empower producers, cooperatives and companies to transform the antiquated business model towards a dynamic and adaptive demand-pull model of the circular economy. And therefore, capitalizing on the various benefits of transparency and open information exchange.

A demand-pull model with the added value of traceability and trust: •

Production – to create more accurate forecasting and confirm proper/ optimal practices

•

Logistics – to verify correct deliverables (deadlines, volumes, product conditions)

•

Storage – to guarantee conditions to store the SKUs in the Distributions Centers

•

Shelf-life – to control the time of each SKU stored on the shelves and collecting the products about to expire to effectively process, for example, to donate to food banks

•

Best Practices – the proper use of products, machinery and software solutions: • • • • •

pesticides crucial for health and environment, food security, sustainable agriculture and forestry, marine, maritime and inland water research and the bio economy, operational safety, upkeep and maintenance, and precision agriculture practices (European Commission, 2019a and 2019b; European Commission, 2018).

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And across the food value chain, the absolute consensus is that the system needs to bring consumers and producers closer together to improve inefficiencies in producing our food and protecting our environment.

Introducing the Data Smart Farmhand Platform: Soil Fingerprint The Data-smart Farmhand is an automated, organized, and open-sourced database platform to help users search, sort and analyze the forest of data and metrics - tracked in real-time so users can make more intelligent decisions and to create impact. This platform offers all shareholders (token holders) access to the marketplace to use its technology to solve their pain points of connectivity, digitalization and harmonization of data to further open collaboration applying those insights.

In the current atmosphere, where there is no one blueprint for working with a blockchain ecosystem and DLT solutions. Most existing DLT supply chain solutions focus on tracking across the entire chain by forcing stakeholders to adopt top-down methods leading to resistance, and slow or no adoption, which hurt both producers and consumers.

However, as we previously noted, our research shows that individual stakeholders process information in different ways and based on their own experiences, which leads to the results being often unsatisfactory and creating more damage than good.

Obtaining significant progress in terms of food production 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. Only then, will organizations will be able to collaborate in a way that will deliver optimum output, viable economical models and open collaboration.

As a consequence, the Data-smart Farmhand platform will start with a minimal viable soil and first mile environmental data to model a soil information fingerprint for producers, providers and consumers to align with existing agriculture cooperative governance in the European Union (EU). By starting with a more focused approach on the first mile, the intention is to include all stakeholders in the process of scaling up the product and ecosystem towards a human-centric governance model for access and financial inclusion. In the future, we will scale the Data-smart Farmhand to include after-the-farmgate logistical data, retail and consumer data, and continue towards connecting all data throughout the entire value chain, from across the world. But, by building the platform step-by-step will help achieve adoption and confidence in the industry. However, the first step will focus on is soil in the European Union.

Within the EU, we could potentially work hand-in-hand with, for example: the European Crop Protection Agency, any existing soil certifying organization, a European Agriculture Cooperative Organization (e.g. COGECA), the European Institute of Technology (EIT Food), European Council of Young Farmers, University of Cambridge Global Food Security program and a variety of EU Commission environmental data sets to model a soil fingerprint using:

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(i)

Soil Microbiome, important for the ecosystem’s nutrient cycling, organic matter turnover, and the development or inhibition of soil pathogens.

(ii)

Carbon Footprint, calculation identifies the quantity and source of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide emitted from the farm, highlighting areas where improvements or changes can be made to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

(iii)

Variable rate fertilizer application, matching applied fertilizer to fertilizer requirements represents a significant input cost saving for the grower and a reduction in potential pollutant loading to ground and surface water (Schumann, 2010).

(iv)

Maximum pesticide residue, sustainable use of pesticides in the EU by reducing the risks and impacts of pesticide use on human health and the environment and promoting the use of Integrated Pest Management (IPM) and of alternative approaches or techniques, such as non-chemical alternatives to pesticides (European Commission, 2019c).

(v)

Water Usage, different crops are subject to irrigation at varying levels of intensity.

Four main categories are distinguished by the Institute for European Environmental Policy (Eurostat, 2019a).

Soil and Agriculture First Mile Needs In 2013, the European Parliament and the Council formally adopted the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which was developed to help farmers produce a sufficient food supply for 500 million European citizens. According to the CAP (2013) directive, the policy would “provide a stable, sustainably produced supply of safe food at affordable prices for consumers, while also ensuring a decent standard of living for 22 million farmers and agricultural workers.”

Importantly, the European Commission (2019a) stated three priorities which the industry should be focusing on: “(i) viable food production; (ii) sustainable management of natural resources; and (iii) balanced development of rural areas throughout the EU.” Note, when considering the management of natural resources, agriculture production today accounts for: 70% of all freshwater consumption; 80% of all pollution released to waterways and oceans; more carbon than all the oil burned to date; and is the most impactful human activity to wildlife populations, genetic diversity and degradation of natural infrastructure.

Mateo-Sagasta et al, 2017 In addition, the European Environment Agency (2015a) considered the global perspective of environmental status, trends and prospect assessments and subsequently has published a European Environment — State and Outlook Report (SOER) which described implementation practices to improve the environment outlook of Europe. And moreover, allows citizens to 17

have a clearer understanding of how to improve and better attend to a sustainable EU environment.

The Europe-wide thematic assessments of the SOER report focused on 13 important metrics, their observations about soil as a key environmental indictor is what demands a closer look in the paper, especially given that almost all fuel, fibre and food resources that humans use are produced on soil. There are many organisms that inhabit the soil which maintain a vital function in the planet’s biodiversity. Due to soil acting as one of the largest carbon sinks, healthier soil usage could significantly affect water and environmental health and reduce the rate of climate change.

Not surprisingly, studies of relevant data show that improving and maintaining soil quality has enormous positive impacts on our entire societal network (Figure 14). Impact factors affect every user, such as access to clean and uncontaminated water, improvements in nutritional outputs, biodiversity regeneration, pollination, pest control or nutrient recycling, and environmental and climate change. Unfortunately, findings suggest that most soil health comprehension for maintaining environmental standards is severely limited (Jones et al, 2012).

Figure 14: European Environment -- state and outlook (EEA, 2015)

Therefore, climate change is inflating soil erosion, intensive agriculture management is increasing the degradation of soil in our croplands, as well as the effects on water, wind, piping and tillage erosion. Consider that it can take the Earth up to one thousand years to generate one inch (2.54 cm) of quality topsoil, much more attention must be given to soil erosion prevention techniques and strategies (Poesen, 2018).

Much of what we think we know about soil is limited by the lack of data or more specifically by the lack of organized and sortable data, but there is momentum to make significant advancements in this regard. In 2018, the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre 18

started one of the most important features, the LUCAS ((Land Use/Land Cover Area Frame Survey) soil project, which is completely opened access. It contains large-scale soil data to improve evidence-based decisions on the EU environmental and economic agenda for scientist and policy makers (European Commission, 2018a).

The Bill Gates, and his Gates Foundation, have also recently focused on soil microbes and the effects on climate change. They maintain that synthetic fertilizers may have changed agriculture in efforts to feed the world, but unfortunately microbes in the soil consume the nitrous oxide in these fertilizers, and release enormous amounts of greenhouse gases. To reduce the amount of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere, their research suggested an increased focus on “collective crop storage�, a strategy which producers collaborate to manage and sell their output at the optimal time to minimize negative environmental effects (Gates Foundation, 2019).

European Producers and Cooperatives Farming is a romantic and tradition-rich industry, and nowhere more than in Europe, where agriculture and livestock output has shaped the culture and its citizens identities for thousands of years (Figure 15). The Mediterranean diet is known throughout the world because it is considered by many nutritional experts to be the healthiest in regards to reducing chronic diseases and the effect of aging. (Romagnolo and Selmin, 2017).

Figure 15: Male producer (Common Usage, 2019)

A century ago, almost 50% of Europeans worked in agriculture and livestock output. Now days, there are approximately 10-11 million people in the EU-28 work in agriculture, 4.4 % of total employment, and three quarters (72.8 %) of those working in agriculture within the EU-

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28 were located in only seven countries: Bulgaria, France, Germany, Italy, Poland Romania and Spain (Eurostat, 2017). There are significantly fewer small plot farmers and arable land in Europe, but the demand is only increasing.

According to the European Commission (EC): Agriculture and Rural Development (2017), the European food supply chain employs 44 million people and many producers work independent from one another, which give them less power to negotiate a better position for their goods and supplies. Furthermore, the EC report stated three specific steps that would improve producer’s power within the food supply chain: “(i) addressing unfair trading practices (UTPs), (ii) market transparency and (iii) producer cooperation.”

For one hundred and fifty years, European farmers have been at the forefront of utilizing cooperatives to strengthen their individual transactional position. These cooperatives are broadly defined as a business owned and democratically controlled by individuals who use its services and whose benefits are derived and distributed equitably on the basis of use (Bijman et al, 2012).

For the European Agri-cooperative, COGECA, the collaborative value is derived from their selfgovernance model of effective control by its members which leverages its extensive farmersmember community to negotiate improved terms together. The improved terms allow 22,000 Agri-cooperatives to generate €350 billion turnover across the entire European Union.

Furthermore, these cooperative agreements generate value for members collecting, processing and marketing produce from their 6 million members, which directly employ over 600,000 individuals (Cogeca, 2015).

Cooperatives give all participants greater opportunity to influence the value chain narrative towards one that is more informed at every step. According to Cooperatives Europe, European institutions can help farmers specifically with: •

Research programmes [that] could be easier to access and more suited to cooperatives.

•

Business transfer to employees could be studied and encouraged through specific policies and financial programmes.

•

Facilitate the participation of co-operatives in EU programmes that encourage the setting up of transnational and national specialist networks and the development of best practices in innovative sectors.

•

The co-operative business model could be recognized as the first choice when speaking about responsible business model and corporate social responsibility (CSR) issue.

Cooperatives Europe, 2019

According to a European Commission Report, Support Farmers’ Cooperatives, spearheaded

by Dr Bijman (2012), the three main factors determining the success of cooperatives are how 20

they relate to “(i) position in the food supply chain, (ii) internal governance, and (iii) the institutional environment.” By using this existing internal governance framework, aligning with the blockchain mechanism and technology that companies build on top of it, cooperatives can broker transactional trust and incentivizes members to further integrate in the ecosystem.

Importantly, stakeholders along the value chain could translate consumer expectations into concrete projects to improve their position across the entire value chain. And these improved projects would incentivize more nutritionally valued output and lead producers to seek new collaborations in efforts to use all their resources to maximize profits. Subsequently, allowing producers and partners to profit by reducing food loss and food waste and improve industry practices towards a more fair and sustainable value chain environment (Cogeca, 2015).

Smart Farming and Data Sovereignty – Who owns the data?

We readily acknowledge the value of Smart Farming to reduce the ecological footprint of producers, because it gives a framework and the metrics which can unbridle siloed technologies, antiquated practices and market segmentation that hinders usage. While much more needs to be done to improve implementation, the most pressing question that appears to weigh down much of the adoption is ‘Who owns the data?’

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) that records the input of resources and the output of products does raise questions of property rights and use of data. Business models might create added value by converting spatially explicit big data into information and advice not only for farmers but also for regulatory authorities who may use the data for surveillance and control. Governments must establish a regulatory architecture that guarantees high-quality data while at the same time fostering trust among all actors involved. The potential misuse of data creates additional legal and ethical challenges for regulation and monitoring ICT and data management can provide novel ways into a profitable, socially accepted agriculture that benefits the environment (e.g., soil, water, climate), species diversity, and farmers in developing and developed countries. But this can only happen with the proactive development of policies supporting the necessary legal and market architecture for smart farming, with a dialogue among farming technology supporters and sceptics, and with careful consideration of emerging ethical questions.

Walter et al, 2017 Data sovereignty is, or should be, integral to every aspect of decision making by government, business, civil society and individuals. Availability of verified, transparent, reliable, and accurate data can make or break a user’s capacity to make robust decisions that guarantee their quality of life and security (Figure 16).

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Figure 16: Investment Opportunities

Governments need data to ensure current and future social services are delivered and built efficiently and effectively. For business, this could be everything from identifying the strategic geo-political risk, to a consultant needing the data to undertake market research. For civil society, it means ensuring their activities have real impact, such as for urban mobility programs to develop sustainable agriculture guidelines. For individuals, it means everything from accessing historical real estate data before they buy their home to a university student undertaking research.

Thousands of government, business, and civil society users are working separately or segmented together to use big data to improve decision making; many of the same users generate and provide data, open or otherwise.

Data sovereignty empowers all users through direct and indirect engagement with: 1. DATA SERVICES - evidenced-based and fulfills a recognized need for access to global and regional data sets 2. USER ENGAGEMENT – brings data users and data providers into a community conversation for peer-to-peer knowledge-sharing, data-sharing and feedback 3. DATA POLICY – using and contributing to cooperative initiatives to harmonize data ontology, promote standards and the use of open data 4. DATA LITERACY – improve the capacity of users to use data for decision making

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OurOUR 40%|60% SOLUTIONS 40%|60% Value VALUE SOLUTIONS Solutions

40% TRANSACTIONAL 60% ADVOCACY

Selling your products and/ or services

Being the custodian of the narrative in your industry ecosystem

Figure: 18 Value Derived from Business Operations

How wisely and holistically we integrate the innovation of blockchain throughout the food system ecosystem will have long-term bearing on how well we feed the world in the decades ahead.

I argue there is value derived from the transactional aspects of our business (40%), the products and services. But there is as much, if not more value that can be derived from an organization being the custodian of their ecosystem narrative (60%), which would allow them to use social selling to demonstrate knowledge that highlights the value added by their product of services. The percentages are largely symbolic to make the point that there is enormous opportunity for business growth in sharing knowledge (Figure 18).

40% 40%Transactional TRANSACTIONAL SOLUTIONS 1. Product: Data Smart Farmhand Platform: Soil Fingerprint The platform would fetch and scrape relevant public data from the European Union’s Copernicus project of both satellite images and in-situ data, the Land Use and Coverage Area frame Survey (LUCAS), the Eurostat Database for Agriculture, the ISRIC — World Soil information, European Soil Data Centre, and other data aggregators, to build a more complete overlaying data picture of our soil fingerprint (Copernicus, 2019; Eurostat, 2019b; Eurostat, 2019c; ISRIC, 2019; European Commission, 2019d).

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Specific soil and crop data would be captured by our platform through participating producers, their cooperatives, distributors, industry organizations and input suppliers, either by manual input, scrapping or automatedly through a system of connected IoT sensors, across the network.

An intuitive search algorithm and sort UX would allow users (producers and the extended interconnected community) to input their data (or make queries) and compare those results to the overall data models for region, country, European level, and potentially globally.

A user, or group of users, would be able to contribute to improved data models with their inputs, and fetch immutable data that would certify the value of their practices, and conversely, how much more effective their outcomes would be by adopting other evidencedbased soil management practices in efforts to improve their results.

Furthermore, citizens would have access to fetch general data maps to have a better view of the ecological impact that agriculture practices have on an extended region. This allows all stakeholders to work closer together to promote better local agriculture standards and reward producers and supply chain stakeholders for their efforts.

This user contributed data would live in a hybrid blockchain solution having both on-chain and off-chain components (Figure 19), with on-chain verification and auditing capabilities, so individual farmers, their cooperative affiliates, distributors, input suppliers and others can assign access for third parties to fetch immutable data for their needs. This mechanism would give the users data sovereignty over how that information will be reused, while giving the ecosystem a snapshot of valuable anonymous data, and potentially another source of revenue (see governance).

Figure 19: Hybrid Token Model

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Using a hybrid architecture will also address data privacy issues, as our system will manage private data and offer auditing capabilities through digital fingerprints computed using cryptographic algorithms, thus our system will offer Privacy-by-design. Stakeholders can decide who to share the digital fingerprint and verification with, as well as sharing policies for the raw data.

This internal database permissioned blockchain acts as the lubricant for the platform - where our system is the custodian of the ‘write’ function of verifying data recording. This allows for real-time updates at a minimum transaction cost – in other words, the cost of building and managing the platform.

In order to make the technology more accessible to stakeholders our core system will consist of two major components: 1.

A software library capable of taking data packages in order to audit them with an onchain solution – this would be a reusable component that can facilitate trust building between stakeholders. Following an open licensing model this software component could be used throughout any of their existing system in order to offer verifiability and auditing capabilities for their data.

2.

A data management and exchange platform that offers a pleasant and intuitive user experience in order to facilitate cooperation, data exchange and free flow of information – all powered by the auditing library for the extra benefit of verifiability

In our vision, these two components together would address most challenges that we face today: the system would build trust between all stakeholders while keeping the adoption barrier low.

For stakeholders, it would be possible to host various types of data and control access to it while still being able to offer tamper protection and verifiability. The system, being built on a modular basis, would make it possible for stakeholders to adopt parts of the tech stack or the full solution. Obviously, the more they adopt, the higher the value that the solution brings to improve the utility. This flexibility will encourage adoption by creating value through technology and contributing towards a more open ecosystem. The proposed technology will fulfil its purpose of facilitating collaboration and trust, while being seamless and nonintrusive.

Another benefit would be for stakeholders to test and verify input supplier data and best practice recommendations, without the fear of exaggerated or ‘manipulated’ data from any third parties.

Moving forward, the producers, cooperatives and distributors can seamlessly transfer a timestamped, digital certification “DNA” to their product’s packaging with information such as soil variety, quality, geography, production practices and timeline. We would work closely with one of the standards organizations on data conformity to create a certification labelling.

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Products reveal relevant and immutable information that empower the chain, and eventually the consumer, to learn as much as possible about each product’s life cycle. The ability to trace, in the moment, each product, gives the community greater insight into what it is eating and how-to better handle, and to sell these items.

For example, this information could verify the “maximum residue level” on products up chain, to demonstrate they are within the highest level of a pesticide residue that is legally tolerated in or on food or feed when pesticides are applied correctly (European Commission, 2019d).

Another potential usage could be for tracking organic standards of soil and crop production providence, which would be transferred to the wholesaler, and as the package moves through to the Point-of-Sale (POS) and into the individual consumers homes. Producers would also be able to trace demand, price fluctuations and access network data to organize more effective practices, without the need for it to pass through unnecessary intermediators.

Governance is perhaps an even more important in terms of accelerating blockchain’s benefits.

Much of the talk about blockchain has been tightly focused on decentralized ledger technology (DLT) and less concerned with governance, but we need these parts to work together to achieve measurable added value.

This new ecosystem governance must incentivize all stakeholders by making them shareholders, and our hybrid model would allow for an off-chain governance of community driven decisions and quorum for voting. However, this is filtered by using on-chain and decentralized access (membership) to participate in that community, and where the centralized custodian agent makes the technical changes for the ecosystem.

This is achieved by creating a public and decentralized blockchain and crypto token to create access to our ecosystem. But since the jury is still out on the blueprint to create this token and the regulatory framework to standardize how we use these systems, as well as the need to scale and connect platform interoperability, we are advocating the development of the internal open sourced and DLT structure of our platform, while, we listen, process and learn the best way forward in terms of the tokenomics and public integration.

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•

Open source database platform

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Agnostic APIs

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Hybrid blockchain model to broker trust and enhance efficiency through increased transparency, whereas the permissioned DLT is the ecosystem lubricant and a decentralized blockchain uses a crypto token access.

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Its immutability validates deliverables

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Agnostic interoperability for future token integration to other decentralized platforms

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Private keys to allow autonomous sharing and segmented monetization of individual farmer and/ or cooperative data.

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Demonstrate measurable value when clients properly use network data

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Disintermediation of Food Distributors while empowering them to realign and more efficiently engage in the value chain ecosystem

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Assist network in complying with industry and manufacturing standards.

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Product has an intuitive, efficient and modern UI/UX

2. Service: Business model relevance analysis and consulting The following is an overview of activities we propose as part of this project.

Individual workshops with producers within our pilot projects to ensure we fully understand their current model, relationship and interaction with other members of the value chain and stakeholders, main challenges affecting, or threatening their model, change readiness, technological and digital maturity, etc.

The content of this sessions would include: • • • • • •

Model analysis with an emphasis on main challenges and opportunities Stakeholder analysis and context Value chain analysis to understand their role, objectives and value generated Gap analysis Today´s processes and use of data Digital skills 27

•

Potential for business model innovation

A similar workshop for distributors/ resellers to understand their model and challenges and help them reinvent their model making use of this new way of working and repositioning their leverage as intermediaries within a blockchain immutability system.

•

• •

Identification of data driven business improvement and customer innovation opportunities with a view to define the most compelling reasons for them to join the initiative, as well as a prioritisation of the main data fields to be captured and the activities and related processes where they can be used.

Mentorship Grant and encourage involvement and participation from all parties to co-create the new solution, since we believe this is the best way to guarantee successful adoption and usage.

60% 60%Advocacy ADVOCACY SOLUTIONS

3. Food System Transformation Narrative The project combines off-chain governance and hybrid off/ on-chain soil data fingerprint, with user friendly experience, thus to incentivize better ecosystem collaboration. To better communicate and engage all partners, our team would lead as a neutral 3rd party custodian and articulate this vision of bringing further transparency to the agriculture industry, which will strengthen perception of products, services, and create confidence across the alignment of the value chain ecosystem.

Moreover, we would facilitate open innovation amongst producers using existing network data, with a dedicated and transparent message that blockchain is a mechanism to evolve the existing processes that previously bogged down collaboration.

•

To confidently use existing network data in decision

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To incentivize producers to share and properly record their data

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To utilize marketing buzz of ‘Blockchain’ to engage all stakeholders

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To build community: Content Creation, Events and Workshops

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Development Roadmap

Figure: 20 Development Roadmap

The main milestones (Figure 20) of our system are: 1. Core Framework. This is the underpinning of a smart data sharing platform based on DLT technology for auditing and verification. The framework makes it possible to publish data in various formats and control access to this data, while offering the guarantee of immutability through cryptographic hashing. The system can be envisioned as a hybrid blockchain solution with a mix of off-chain data and on-chain verification possibilities so that both privacy and authenticity concerns are addressed. Thus, our system facilitates trust building within stakeholders by using a Privacy-by-Design model and can be adopted on top of a series of business models, while offering a low entry barrier and adoption curve.

The Core Framework will have two main building blocks: • A software library capable of taking data packages in order to audit them with an onchain solution – this would be a reusable component that can facilitate trust building between stakeholders. Following an open licensing model this software component could be used in any of their existing system in order to offer verifiability and auditing capabilities for their data.

• A data management and exchange platform that offers a pleasant and intuitive user experience in order to facilitate cooperation, data exchange and free flow of information – all powered by the auditing library for the extra benefit of verifiability 2. Data Augmentation. Having a stable framework to exchange data, this component facilitates the use of publicly available datasets combined with stakeholder’s own data. Data discovery and exchange will be facilitated while stakeholders would be in full control of the type of data they are publishing.

3. Standardization. While offering a way of publishing data in various formats is key and appealing to the majority of stakeholders, we are also mindful of the fact that a relevant portion of data will contain similar metrics and KPIs. Defining standard around data structures and exchange formats will greatly enhance the interoperability with other systems and will facilitate and streamline data exchange between parties that would find it difficult to work together otherwise.

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4. Data Connectors. Once our ecosystem is proven to bring value to the industry, we will move our focus towards higher scale adoption, which comes with its own challenges. One of the major challenges is the effort needed to publish data into the system, thus automating this process as much as possible is crucial at this point. Creating and delivering various data connectors to widely adopted and used systems could facilitate the flow of information between internal tools (ERP, custom data stores) and our platform. Having an open architecture and a transparent and agnostic API will facilitate this phase.

5. Tokenization. Incentivizing stakeholders to publish recent and accurate data is key in achieving the vision of the project. Creating a crypto utility token would be a direct means of incentivizing stakeholders as they would become effective shareholders of the system.

6. IoT connectivity. Once data is flowing through the system our next step will be to automate data collection even further. Smart contract-enabled IoT connectivity will contribute not only to the automation of data ingestion, but will also build trust between parties, as data will flow directly from sensors and other devices into the system.

Business Model Canvas •

To use the MVP (Figure 21, 22), customers could be charged based on the amount of segmented or sorted data they want to use or with a subscription for an unlimited amount of data.

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Input suppliers would pay to have access to farmers and distributors data. Retailers would pay to better understand the consumers purchasing habits.

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Issuing of a Token with Share of Value to holders.

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Visualising the data on the UI is free; downloading data or downloading visualised data (maps, tables etc) is charged.

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Environmental Labelling and Certification – for example, the UK Soil Association’s organic certification for Horticulture land is 400GDP per ha, per year.

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Other more complex pricing models could be developed – e.g. training and consultancy

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Cost savings from improved usage of products and services across agriculture supply chain.

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Workshop Fees and Sponsorships.

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Figure 21: Value Proposition Canvas (Osterwalder et al., 2014)

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Figure 22: Business Model Canvas (Stolz and Kirkland, 2020)

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EXPECTED IMPACT DATA-SMARTFARMHAND FARMHAND EXPECTED IMPACTOF OFTHE THE DATA-SMART Soil Information Fingerprint | Data-smart Farmhand Platform The expected impact of the Data-smart Farmhand (DSFH) platform starts with implementation of the first phase, the Soil Information Fingerprint (SIF) of minimal viable soil and first mile environmental data. But it is only one step of our efforts to harmonize a wholistic database for a more transparent and secure food system.

Ultimately, the DFSH framework will connect a systemwide database product and inclusive ecosystem with seamless interoperability, inclusive governance and stakeholder access to a marketplace of technology. This will allow all stakeholders to be rewarded with double- and triple-bottom-line returns (returns on investment, environmentally sustainable returns and returns that ‘do good’) throughout the entire value chain. These returns will start with the implementation of the SIF and will multiply exponentially as the platform is built and scaled to include all parts of the food system.

Further stakeholder engagement with DSFH platform is necessary to create data conformity across the entire value chain and to satisfy the mountain of needs from different users, and build token velocity for store-of-value. Importantly, extensive industry participation is necessary in order to identify the best food system metrics, how to scale the ecosystem as a community, and gain acceptance of this sustainable business model.

1. Tokenization of Food System Ecosystem: Value In, Value Out As a consequence, there are four ways a blockchain-based and tokenized DSFH with a SIF business model economically benefits producers directly, and all stakeholders indirectly: •

More profits for producers, because less (or zero) profit sharing with intermediaries.

Broadly, the entire ecosystem is incentivized to achieve more nutritional, safe and affordable products for consumers, and with less compliance costs for the chain.

•

Better and more useful technology (tools) to improve sales channel visualization and safety, reduce waste and loss, and receive transparent upstream feedback. To start, the SIF will mostly help the producers, but as we scale the DSFH platform, other tools connected to the SIF will be built that bring the same type of value to other chain stakeholders.

•

Producers compensated for data (token), data ownership which incentivizes them to use more services -- more often -- and to input quality data into the system. This will be true for any stakeholder that generates data using the DSFH token.

•

Store-of-value of token – there is a finite number of tokens, so the model incentivizes users to promote the value of the ecosystem to others to generate velocity across the entire DSFH platform. More usage, means more demand for the tokens, which in turn

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means a higher value of the token in someone’s possession. Furthermore, being a shareholder should incentivize inputting quality data into the system. Better Data Input and More Data Inputs. Replace Garbage In, Garbage Out, with Value in, Value out!

2. Standards for Data Conformity and Environmental Labelling The aim of organizing the pertinent viable data on the blockchain and structuring an immutable database platform of food system information, such as the SIF, is to build conformity to develop a packaging environmental-label framework.

According to the European Union: Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), streamlining bureaucracy and creating conformity in data usage is vital in producing a sufficient food supply for 500 million EU citizens. This improved data usage can strengthen the position of producers within the food production chain, thus making the CAP more efficient and more transparent, while providing a response to the challenges of food safety, climate change, growth and jobs in rural areas. And thus, would help the EU to achieve its Europe2020 objectives of promoting smart, sustainable and inclusive growth (European Commission, 2019e).

Starting with the SIF, the platform could scale to allow retailers to input their data in efforts to continue the product’s data DNA as it moves up the chain and into a consumer’s home or restaurant. The retailer could have an application for consumers to research individual products in the retail brick-and-mortar stores, or eCommerce sites, to compare the value of the carbon footprint, water usage and dietary requirements amongst the different SKUs (Stock-Keeping Unit). Subsequently, the consumer would be using the environmental label rating system to measure data similarly to how consumers read the existing nutritional information already on product labels. As well, it could conceivably empower conscious consumers by connecting product packages to their home smart devices by scanning the labels, and allowing them to receive updates on the lifecycle of products in their refrigerators, in efforts to reduce food waste and minimize the effects of potential contamination.

Consider that there is a common belief among consumers that buying local reduces the carbon foot print, but a less known fact is that there are various instances when buying local may cause a larger environmental impact overall than to transport that same product from a more optimal environmental growth area, such as when it is out of season for the product.

Also, it is possible the product may have a lower nutritional value or the benefits of reducing the carbon foot print do not outweigh the alternative, such as, when compared to the strain on our water impact.

One example, when looking at imported Moroccan vs. off-season, locally produced French tomatoes, which studies have found that from the perspective of freshwater, the French options is more optimal compared to the Moroccan imports, whereas the opposite is true in regards to carbon and energy perspective (Meyerding et al, 2019).

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3. Empower Cooperatives, Individuals and Intermediaries to Stay Relevant Bottom-up solutions embed trust and further open collaboration using shared data and aligns the Cooperative’s governance model with a blockchain-backed and human-centric model for access and financial inclusion in an ecosystem.

Cooperatives can be very useful to help individual stakeholders, but their market power is limited when compared to their retail customers and suppliers. Which is causing cooperatives to merge further across the globe to help bring more market power, but this homogenization may generalize the desired outcome and create the potential for weakening the specific value for individual local member control (European Commission, 2019f). Moreover, a more transparent way to track and effectively deciphering data would be an enormous deterrent against negligent or nefarious transactions, and demonstrating a more transparent transactions would be significant to help cooperatives produce and market their products for higher value and returns.

A blockchain ecosystem could strength the positions of individual producers and their cooperatives in regards to negotiating in the aforementioned points; and how agriculture practices affect citizens beyond the obvious question of how we procure our meals.

Consumers have far from an ideal experience understanding how companies use their personal data, how new innovative models affect workers conditions, how a company's value chain is impacting the environment. The result is a growing user conscience to the need of reacting and demanding evidence of good behaviour, and to flex the muscle and exercise control through buying decisions. There are many examples of the fast-growing importance of establishing trust to meet the demands of consumers.

Consumer misalignment and addressing the issue of trust and information visibility can be alleviated by technology as part of the solution. Technologies can guarantee the validity and immutability of certain actions and records; however, many valid technologies do not meet expectations in its implementation. These implementation short comings result in lack of the necessary adoption, or even worse, they were misused or introduced in a way that did not deliver any positive change and were eventually rejected, or abandoned.

Empowering Intermediaries to ‘Stay Relevant’ in terms of connecting stakeholders and giving them share of value through token compensation for their efforts would align the adoption of the DSFH and SIF platform with all stakeholders.

4. Improve Input Supplier Access to Improve Usage of Products/ Services You can see that increased access to cooperative and individual farmer’s data will improve research and development capabilities of input supplier companies. As well as improve the communicate around best practices of their products and research to all partners. By allowing input suppliers to have further insight into how producers apply, integrate, upkeep and utilize their products and services will allow them to improve their offerings and to more precisely demonstrate the value of their products.

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Reducing the light between how input suppliers intended their products to be used and actually used will lead to improved nutritional yields, in crop production, lead to minimizing food lost and waste and improved environmental compliance.

And improved operational safety for the direct customer and indirectly for consumers and other citizens throughout the value chain, for example, reduce water contamination from unnecessary fertilizer and/ or pesticide application.

5. United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Improving the Soil Ecosystem to Minimize Food Loss and Food Waste The global population is projected to reach 9.8 billion people by 2050, and in 2018, for the first time in history, the world population of middle and upper classes equalled our most vulnerable population (Figure 17). In this instance, a vulnerable population is when a household is spending below $1.90 per person per day and those in the middle class are when households are spending $11-110 per day per person, in 2011 purchasing power parity.

Owning to the assumption that our food waste problem will only grow as a population with further expendable income increases, and meanwhile our food loss problems will continue to cause concerns, the ecological burden of the food system looks to increase by 50–90% without technological changes and the implementation of mitigation actions (Springmann et al, 2018; Kharas and Hamel, 2018; United Nations, 2017; World Bank, 2018).

Figure 17: The Global Tipping Point (Kharas and Hamel, 2018).

Subsequently, sustainable mitigation action is necessary to bring measurable added value when tackling the challenges of our generation as stated by the UN Sustainable Development Goals for 2030. The metrics defining sustainability and how it is used in the parlance of agriculture have been broadly applied to the industry, but several scholars argue it originally meant farming that does not erode its own base of soil, water, farmers, or children willing to farm. Sustainable factors such as access to clean and uncontaminated water, improvements in nutritional outputs, biodiversity regeneration, pollination, pest control or nutrient recycling, and environmental and climate change affects every user.

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Furthermore, the United States Public Broadcasting Service report on the future of agriculture defined sustainable agriculture as: • • • • • •

bio-diversity in the soil farmers dispersed on the land with the option of smaller farms meat and produce grown with personal care and attention fair markets for crops and animals local surface or groundwater quality watersheds that are not contaminated by farm runoff

(Waterhouse, 1999)

But specifically, the United Nations identify soil resources as of crucial importance for sustainable human development and food security for individual citizens, thus, the need for improving and maintaining soil quality has enormous positive impacts toward zero-land degradation and environmentally sustainable returns. The soil degradation problems will only increase with further social, economic and climate changes, this is significant because recent reports only continue to highlight the negative environmental impact of each individual’s actions on our food system resiliency. More than ever, we need a literate soil definition and precisely defined metrics which allow all citizens to be engaged and empowered in any mitigation measures (Keesstra et al. 2016; United Nations, 2015).

Farmers in the EU are the first line of defence for protecting the natural environment of soil, water, air and biodiversity on 48% of the EU's land. A 2017 commission to the European Parliament stated: Our Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) should lead a transition towards a more sustainable agriculture, where a majority of farmers and other stakeholders believe that they should do more about environmental and climate challenges. Land-based measures are pivotal to achieving the environmental and climate-related goals of the EU, and farmers are the primary economic agents in delivering these important societal goals.

(European Commission, 2019g) International organizations and policy makers continue to show interest in identifying and researching these metrics in efforts to improve the soil ecosystem for a more sustainable production of agriculture products. The European Commission Joint Research Centre Institute for Environment and Sustainability has put efforts behind mapping the effects of our soil and funding partners to contribute to their LUCAS Soil project in aims to lead a global examination of soil biodiversity (Panagos et al. 2012; European Commission 2019f). Soils metrics were a large focus of the UN Rio+20 Summit, which drilled down on soil degradation as part of land degradation. They called for a land-degradation-neutral world in align with the 2030 UN Sustainable Development Goals, to which the EU subscribes.

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The social and economic benefits of improving soil usage and minimizing its extended effects on the environment was also a main topic at their European Union 7th Environment Action Programme Conference (European Environmental Agency 2015a; 2015b). The motivation is there and the needs are obvious, now we need blockchain to connect all the valuable partners on the same track, a gender, political and cultural-level playing field, leading towards better value and smarter returns.

Personal Motivation: Value of Transparency - Do Good Do Well.

Agriculture and the Food Value chain are not the low hanging fruit like Fintech when it comes to blockchain integration, but they are the most tangible example of how integrating blockchain can affect every individual stakeholder to build a more efficient business model.

Because, it affects something we all need to consider daily (if we are lucky), what we eat and where our food comes from?

Twenty-thousand-years ago, more stable economic relations were brought about with a change in socio-economic conditions from a reliance on hunting and gathering of foods to domesticated agricultural practices. At that time, the trust developed for nutritional utility of the food system lead to food products becoming currency. Then bulk varieties of products became tradable commodities, with value of exchange that could be measured similar to scarce metals like gold and silver. Aristotle describe the value derived from each household’s agricultural output as their Oikonomikos (economics). According to a translation by Armstrong (1935), Aristotle also said that agriculture is the most honest of all such occupations; seeing that the wealth it brings is not derived from other men.

Later, our banking system transformed that trust into a paper guaranteed system, that allowed centralized organization to assign value to goods and services – totally removing the physical utility value of products and backing of scarcity. Into the 20th century, that trust was assigned to a piece of code that would transfer between institutions, rendering the physical transaction of goods to cease to matter as well.

With Blockchain, the concept of tangible utility value and scarcity can return to food products, where a token immutability verifies deliverables and allows a trustworthiness system to dictate the measure of value – where transactional value is measured again in real food metrics like nutritional yield, and not just disposable volume with little measurable value.

What a great time to be alive, when we can all be food experts and truly influence maybe the most basic social-economic engine that transcendence all cultures, races, genders and locations – our exchange of food utility.

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About author ABOUT AUTHOR Brian Heinen Founder, Food System Transformation Researcher and Blockchain Innovation Business Developer @brianheinen Drawing from 20 years of collaborating with a global community of multinational stake holders, influencers, suppliers, contacts, and other professional resources to orchestrate collaborative and turn-key solutions in Innovation Development and Transformational Business Creation.

Since 2013, when he started as the Executive Producer of the Bitcoin Foundation 2014 Initiative, Brian has researched and advocated for blockchain solutions. This continued in his role as co-owner of the 350,000 Procurement Professionals Group, when he started to research the value of blockchain’s immutability and inclusive governance narrative in transforming the food value chain.

Now days, Brian sits in-between academic, start-ups, SMEs and large multinationals to help wrap their minds around the measurable added value of using blockchain to transform the ecosystem business model and reduce food waste and loss.

In 2019, Brian received a grant from the European Institute of Technology (EIT Food) to study a M.Sc. in Food System Transformation and Management (University of Reading + AU of Madrid) and is now writing a graduate portfolio on the role of conformity framework to give structure to harmonized data ontology and ecosystem interoperability standards for blockchain integration in the food value chain.

He has helped launched and developed blockchain projects that have raised over 35 million USD in funding and produced business development projects with budgets upwards of a million-dollars. He was a strategic consultant at Allfoodexperts - the Farm-to-fork Open Innovation Community Platform.

Brian has debated his blockchain and agriculture research at the European Parliament alongside Members of Parliament, the European Commission, EIT Digital, and various IEEE industry leaders, and presented his research at numerous other industry events.

You can read more in his latest Inside Food & Drink article and Parliamentary Magazine articles.

Brian owns the Blockchain in Europe group, Blockchain ambassador for Funding Box Community, and a founding member of the IEEE 2418.3 ‘Standards for the framework of DLT use in Agriculture’ Working Group - bringing conformity to how we connect our ecosystems.

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Cogeca (2015) Development of Agriculture Cooperatives in the EU 2014. URL: http://www.agroalimentarias.coop/ficheros/doc/04519.pdf [14 April, 2019].

Cooperatives Europe (2019) EU2020: “Innovation Union”. URL: https://coopseurope.coop/about-cooperatives/eu2020-%E2%80%9Cinnovation-union%E2%80%9D [08 April, 2019].

Copernicus (2019) Land Monitoring Data. URL: https://land.copernicus.eu/ [15 March 2019].

European Commission (2017) Agriculture and Rural Development: Initiative to improve the food supply chain.

URL: https://ec.europa.eu/info/consultations/initiative-improve-food-supply-chain_en [09 April 2019].

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