Blockchain in the Food Chain
I recently read about yet another recall of tainted food. Today, we have the technological know-how to completely eliminate this problem, as well as many other issues in the food chain, but we are slow to adopt them. We have the ability to trace food from the field where it was grown all the way through to your plate, and we need to overcome the knowledge and economic barriers that keep us from understanding and using the data about our most most precious resource — our food supply.
For example, many people have heard about blockchain technology, but few understand what it is. Invented as part of Bitcoin, it is essentially an auditable, public record of all transactions involving a Bitcoin (or any crypto currency) from when the Bitcoin was “mined” (or electronically minted) up to this moment. It provides a way for anyone to verify that a Bitcoin is authentic and hasn’t been tampered with as it is electronically handed off from owner to owner. Though this security layer is absolutely necessary for crypto currency, it could actually be more useful when applied generally to verifying bits of data from the devices that create them through their journey to the cloud.
However, it’s easy to see that with a small amount of additional technology, you could use blockchain to verify and audit the transfer and handling of food materials from the farm to the table. We have the ability to spray biomarkers on plants in the field, or even coat the seeds planted in the ground, such that the inception point of a leaf of lettuce could be traced to the field or even to the planting row. Were that data registered as the start of a blockchain for that ingredient, each point of transfer or processing could add data to that chain, including tagging bags of crops in the field, to the trucks that transport it, to the factories that process the food, to the warehouses, distribution centers and grocery store shelves. With that data, chefs and consumers could potentially compare different products to see which took the shortest path — thus preserving the most nutrition and containing the fewest processing steps and chemicals — and make purchase decisions based on auditing the blockchain’s unbiased results.
Yet, today’s farmers are hard pressed to adopt these technologies, primarily because of cost. Commodity markets by nature don’t allow for the differentiation of one ear of corn from another. Adding these technologies only raises the cost of production without the ability to lift the price paid for the result if the downstream markets don’t demand the differentiation.
Even were this challenge overcome by consumers demanding food traceability and willing to pay more for the same, we find that the farms themselves are light on technological infrastructure. Today we take aerial pictures of fields before planting, in order to set seeders to adjust what’s dropped in each row based on soil consistency and moisture, and we measure yield at harvest time dynamically as the combines roll across the same rows. This data can be correlated and pinpointed to areas of fields and used to mitigate soil issues and set the seeders more effectively next season.
Though this sounds fairly sophisticated — and it is, compared to what was happening just a few years ago — it’s nowhere near what is possible. It’s essentially the same as the manager of an automotive assembly line taking a picture on April 1st of that line before the first shift of the day starts, and then a second picture on August 31st of the same line after everyone leaves for the day, and by comparing pictures, figure out how well you did in producing cars that summer. The farm field is essentially a factory floor that is outside, and yet it benefits from nearly none of the technological advancements in live metering, measurement and monitoring we find inside any other factory.
Therefore, it’s not merely economics that is at the heart of this low technological sophistication. Even if sensors were deployed in the soil and in the field all season long, unless that field is within a few miles of a major freeway or a city, it would largely be outside the range of connectivity by any means, be it cellular or wired networks. The cost of this “last mile” coverage is staggering — so much so, that it’s an impossibility to expect that the owners of these communication networks could pay to connect every farm field, nor can the farmer of commodity products cover off on such an expense with a reasonable return on investment. Thus, most of our farm land in my home State of Indiana might as well be on Mars for as connected as it is.
What is needed is a way for farmers to leverage the value of their land towards improving its network connectivity. It’s true that Internet connected land is more valuable than non-Internet connected land. If a developer of an apartment complex were to build two identical units, one fully wired in every room, and the other without any Internet at all, that developer would be able to charge more for the connected apartments than the non-connected ones, and thus have a more valuable building because of that connectivity. We need a method to do the same for our farmers, enabling them to put the equity in the value of their land to work in service of improving its connectivity, and therefore its value. Low or tax-free loans for technology infrastructure might do the trick.
We as consumers must demand more from our food suppliers. The data about how, where and when our food was created and processed is all around us, but not in the can with our vegetables.
