Agriculture and the Blockchain Technology
Blockchain technology has been addressing several aspects of our lives, since it has become a digitization and efficiency tool for different sectors of the economy.
The world of agriculture has begun to use distributed accounting as an efficient, organized and safe operating mechanism.
Agriculture is in search of innovation to optimize its way of addressing its problems, increase its quality and quantity of production using disruptive technologies.
AgriLedger is one of the companies that is dedicated to smart agriculture, developing a cooperative platform for handling merchandise directed to the agro sector, based on a blockchain software.
The biggest major challenge of AgriLedger is to reduce the loss of value of the crops, which decreases 50% between the harvest and the final sale.
AgriLedger focuses on providing solutions to small farmers, who face great problems of efficiency and transparency due to the way they have been working so far - with verbal agreements and paper records, mostly. Therefore, they developed an application for smartphones that registers and processes cooperative agreements in a safe and transparent manner to make the agreements and data collected incorruptible.
On December 9, 2016 the company Full Profile managed to make the first settlement in the market of an agricultural product between a producer and a buyer with Blockchain technology.
According to Full Profile, farmers take between two or five weeks to collect the merchandise sold, which causes unnecessary risks throughout the agri-food chain. The company managed to get an Australian farmer to sell 23 tons of wheat to the international exporter Fletcher, through a private Blockchain network.
The operation was executed through AgriDigital, a management software for cereal producers, buyers and operators, which allows users to manage grain contracts, deliveries, transfers between warehouses, invoices and payments in one place and instantly.
The results of this transaction are encouraging, because it allows farmers to maintain cash flow and manage their business much better.
Another important aspect offered by Blockchain technology is the traceability of food, as a guarantee of safety, truth and confidence for consumers. This aspect is vital due to the mad cow crisis in the 1990s. CODEX, the international body created by FAO and the World Health Organization developed international food standards and defines traceability as "the ability to follow the movement of a food through specific stages of production, transformation and distribution ".
The Blockchain technology has proved extraordinarily valuable to achieve the goal of traceability, because it allows us to track the journey made by any food product, from its birth to our tables, be it meat, fish, vegetables or fruit.
The company Provenance, presents the solution for the transparency of products in the food supply chains. This platform uses Blockchain to create an open traceability protocol, where anyone can trace the origin of anything from coffee beans to a roll of cloth.
The retail multinational WalMart recently announced the collaboration with IBM and a University of Beijing to follow the trail of pork in China through a Blockchain. WalMart also uses the block chain to see the traceability of Brazilian mangoes consumed in China.
The Blockchain technology can also be of great help to the more than one billion people who live off agriculture in the world, by allowing them to carry out purchase and sale operations without the need for intermediaries and lowering the high commissions of transactions.
It can also facilitate access to financing in countries where there are hardly any banking offices and mobile phones have become pocket banks.
Since 2007 in Russia, a project called Kolionovo Ecosystem has been developing and investigating the creation of a new model of rural economy based on cryptocurrencies. The project includes public and private farms, legal entities engaged in production and other members of the Russian agroeconomic ecosystem. Russia produced 103,154,436 tons of cereals per year for 2014, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.
The idea is that all members of the agricultural production machinery operate under a cryptoactive based on the Waves platform, because this would be an alternative way to generate financing for producers without the need to use bank loans or state subsidies, but using the disposition of private industry in a safe way and supported by the blockchain of Emercoin.
Thanks to @sirknight for the #celestialchallenge.
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https://es.cointelegraph.com/news/growing-the-garden-how-to-use-blockchain-in-agriculture
