Detailed Plan

Summary

• Smallholder farmers verify their identity and link it to their field boundaries. This link allows them to introduce additional information on their crops into the data frame (helping them to build a market identity), as well as through their identity account they can receive monetary funds.

• End-Consumers can access the public information stored on the blockchain directly and contribute funds downstream.

• All intermediates (food processors, traders, other consumers, etc.) can participate by 1) introducing additional information on the products 2) link different products off the supply chain together 3) provide financial incentives downstream for the provision of services.

• Some information on the product chain is public, some are only provided to specific parties. All information provided is automatically processed to introduce and attach impact calculations to the products.

Overall project idea:

Delivery

The partners will develop a revolutionary first-of-its-kind digital data frame for inviting supply chain actors’ participation towards deriving food products’ specific environmental impact from their actual supply chain traceability data. The data frame infrastructure will be able to calculate the environmental impact of all food products in European stores, allowing consumers to make informed food choices, and food suppliers to understand and change their product’s specific environmental footprint.

1. The infrastructure will enable the automated collection of data about production practices through remote sensing based on geo-space technologies. Events such as deforestation and other land-use changes, which have a great influence on environmental footprint, will be tracked and linked to the specific crop that was produced within the automatically detected field boundaries.

2. that information, together with the collection of data for tracking of transactions of food items along the value chain, will be linked into the Cardano infrastructure. To overcome the complexity generated by the multitude of individual stakeholders each possessing a piece of the supply information, the blockchain represents an innovative and efficient answer to link all those data in one central ledger. This will enable the consolidation of all information for traceability and transparency of the food value chain in an open data and trustworthy way. After the integration and control of those data, the environmental footprint of the product will be calculated using innovative gap filling and data modeling techniques.

Motivation

There is an urgent need to transform our food system in order to tackle climate change. Food consumption is contributing to about 30% of the world’s household’s GHG emissions, as well as it is at the heart of keeping within other planetary boundaries. As a society, we need to change our food behaviors towards products with lower environmental impact. This change can only be obtained by bringing transparency on the real environmental impact of every food product to the surface, to give all actors along the supply chain – from farm to fork - the means to make better decisions.

Smallholder farmers

We create the incentive to get their story and efforts recognized. As participants, they will be provided with meaningful insights to optimize their farming patterns. Any contribution towards optimizing yields and improving patterns for sustainable fair trade, that is beyond their own capacity, they can directly ask consumers for support.

Supply chain

The project will provide food producers and retailers with a service to obtain trustworthy and detailed environmental footprint calculations of their products as well as the possibility to refine and improve their production environmental impact calculation by integrating their privately owned data. The service will enable them to get a deeper understanding of where to act to improve their product’s footprint, as well as the opportunity to visually display the product footprint through logo on pack and be used for marketing purposes.

Time schedule

First 3 months:

Crop information and field boundaries are mapped out via satellite images and neural networks. (Hummingbird)

After 6 months:

Through the communication of environmental impacts (modeled CO₂ calculations for millions) of food products based on the available information on the stock control unit (SKU), we incentive players along the supply chain to participate in data collection efforts linking crops towards the end products. (Eaternity)

After 12 months:

Each data contribution is profiled and fits into a scientific framework contributing to higher quality consumer information for the product. (Hestia)

All the data is linked into the blockchain in connection with the ongoing efforts in Atala Prism and Trace. Allowing farmers to receive an ID and claim their agricultural land via a simple and user-friendly interface.

Public Launch Date:

October 2022

Later:

At a later stage consumers (of the various production stages), will be able to contribute funds towards the smallholder farmers through voluntary donations, or contractual agreements. For example, an end consumer wants to support the farmer’s effort to reduce carbon emissions by using solar panels and directly through the identification provided on the SKU channels donations towards the farmer.

Underlying features to be developed to accomplish this project:

Dispute System: Each information introduced to the supply chain needs to be regarded as a not-certain, and stay open to dispute. Hence each information introduced is staked and can be challenged via an oracle so that the verification of the information is converted into a digital asset. For example, farmers claim their field at the point in time of registering through their wallet, and hence it is linked to their personal identity. Each other participant who claims to know different can dispute the fact and third actors and verifications schemes (e.g. governmental agencies) can resolve it.

Private-public hybrid: The framework allows to introduce data that is not completely public, but only accessible to specific actors. For example access to information about production details that should only be used for the impact calculations (e.g. the amount of fertilizer used) is only granted to the impact calculation engine. All data is nevertheless hashed and committed as such to the public blockchain. The container storage and private data access could be handled with content encryption and IPFS hybrid-private networks.

Cascading Identities: To recover and verify identities we introduce a smart Plutus contract, that allows each actor to associate their wallet with other trusted central institutions or persons, for the sake of 1) verifying my identity and 2) to recover funds and identity given the circumstance of lost credentials. These trusted parties will never have access to the private key of the wallet and are only allowed to intervene by the conditions set by the user of the original wallet.

Direct Access Product Scores: For each stock control unit (or SKU; basically any product on a retail market shelf) a unique identity and public URL will always link to the latest and most up-to-date impact assessment result. A simple static website with javascript will query the blockchain and pull the latest information for the display of the product and its environmental ratings.

Remark:

The organizations will already contribute about 1.5m € towards this project in December 2021. We are looking for additional funds and partners.