Digital Twins NFTs for Farm products
Tags: Nft, Agriculture, Farmers, Digital Twin, Blockchain

Problem statement :

It becomes harder for small farmers to support a high demand of fresh, local food with industrial standards and keep sustainability.

Solution:

Our solution is to help farmers to make standards NFT of their products in order to be more valuable for consumers, industrial and services.

Plan:

💸 Market perspectives

Globally, 500 million smallholders produce more than 80% of the food production and contribute directly to feed 2 billion consumers. Agriculture accounts for 30% of the global workforce and for 70% of water use [1]. The agricultural and food market is valued at more than 8 Trillion USD worldwide and 1 Trillion only in the US [2]. This sector is highly centralized, in the US 4 dominant trading firms control more than 89% of the grain sector [3] where in France, 4 central markets share 91% of food market turnover. 2019 data showed that the agro-food supply chain (ASCs) produce 75% of food systems GHG where 26% of waste is generated by food service and 13% from retails [4] . ASCs lead to intensive food production that have severe consequences on the food autonomy and resilience. Smallholders that directly contribute to food autonomy and resilience, essential to preserve ecosystems, are collapsing. France and Germany report a lack of 200 000 smallholders workers (Deloitte) where ⅓ disappeared from 2000 to 2016 and another ¼ will disappear in 2030 (CRATER) .

COVID-19 pandemic increase the need for local and transparent food, which can be empowered by blockchain [5]. Blockchain traceability solution will reach 886 million in 2025 with IBM Food Trust partner, and iTradeNetwork (Hyperledger), Agriledger and AgUnity that compete to link farmers and industrial. However all actual blockchain solution are permissioned and highly centralized thus tends to raise the technological barrier for farmers and increase inequality between large farmers and smallholders.Thus we need to develop a new solution that can decentralized agriculture and raise mass adoption of farmers for the blockchain.

🍅 Product

A public and decentralized Public blockchain technologies can offer transparent traceability , public data about freshness and quality labeling but can also protect and reward smallholders for their productions and contribution to a safer and secure food system.

Digital Twin (DT) is a representation of a physical product that mirrors its states, behavior, position across its lifecycle. DT for Farm products can store products’ details ( shape, weight, taste, variety) current production state (seeding,growing,harvesting), freshness, and transaction (importer, stockage, reseller). [6] [7] DT can help provide best-before-date and guaranteed shelf life that can directly reduce food waste [8] and helps farmers to collect data and make better product management and sales decisions.

Our product is a free access platform with comprehensive tutorial to create a robust NFT for farmers that include the following features:

NFT simplified design

We let farmers make and store NFT in their wallet and give instructions to do so.

The platform offer easy and comprehensive steps to build an NFT with product data (name, type, geography, living/mineral source, product part), pictures and description through a simplified form translated. To do so we can integrate with existing api

The platform offer management board to interact with NFT.

2. Universal standards

Data input from the farmer are register in the Global Product Classification (GPC) standards. GPC partnered with UN/CEFQCT, ISO TC 154, OASIS and W3C, is translated in 16 languages and globally adopted. [9]

This standard will helps for consumer and Ago-food supply chain adoption

Data will be accessible and computer to perform analysis.

3. Technical Embeed

Products and transactions can be stored onchain on Cardano

Digital twin NFT metadata can interact with farmers UI, ERP and IOT to mirror actual state of the product.

Metadata also store product traceability and certification information.

Then NFT should show the actionable insight:

Prove provenance and product history

Capacity to easily interact with farmers, consumers, cooperatives, suppliers , contractors, certification and inspection in a network dynamic.

Update status (status, content, owner) respect with oracle

🎯 Acquisition

We need to prove to the farmer that this solution is an easy and costless process that can have multiple advantages compared to other Blockachain traceability solution:

NFTs will help them streamline the supply chain and audit trail. It will raises awareness for their consumersand helps the mproof the freshness and quality of the products.

NFTs removes the needs for third parties, then rapidly farmers will be able to sell their products directly to the consumer, commercant and industrial using ADA or any currencies.

By register their product on the blockchain and proving their farmers status they can attract banks and investors more easily. Government, NGO and research can also help to detect and rewards farmers and cooperative more easily and perform analysis on food resilience and soil regeneration.

By proving their daily production and traceability it will be easier for certification center to give organic labels.

Others services can be build on top of this NFT products such auditing, insurance, marketing, NFT swapping and cooperative integration.

🧐 Monopoly

The platform is open source and made for farmer to increase Cardano NFT mass adoption. NFTs will be build on the Cardano blockchain, GPC standards and design to evolve with farmers and IOT inputs.

We will provide research effort to design the NFT and create a user-friendly platform that help farmers to build and store their NFT. Thus we will develop a bigger ecosystem to of application and services to support their work.

This platform will be a first step for consumers, farmers, cooperative, government and NGO to collaborate in an universal NFT framework for farm products and build a decentralized agriculture beneficial for the entire society.

💰 Show us the money

This project needs a Cardano associate developer and an agro-industrial researcher both granted for the following deliverables:

An open source platform prototype to create DT-NFT farm products with Github, tutorial, comprehensive data structure, show case and applications.

An exploratory research paper on DT-NFT farm products with dedicated effort made to develop an open source platform that creates comprehensive NFT stored on the blockchain.

🚗 Getting on the road

For the next 3 months create the first functionality of the NFT maker and work on the first part of the research paper.

For the next 6 months the research paper will be completed and submitted, we will improve the platform functionality to integrate iOT and farmers input and associatie with farmers for a beta testing. We will also attract funded to keep on progressing and offer more services.

For the next 9 months the platform will be fully operational and farmers will be able to generate and manage their own tokens and interact with several services of traceability and transaction.

Defining success

Our mission is to open NFT to farmers for them to become a maker with the same level of technical, legal and bargaining power as agro-food industrial and decentralized agriculture.

By creating an online platform for farmers to become NFT maker we hope it will protect their ownership, products and prices, improve the supply chain freshness and access credit from collateral. Production will become responsive to local needs and supply chains will be structured around value creation.

📃 References

1. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. The future of food and agriculture: Trends and challenges. Food & Agriculture Org.; 2018.

2. Ag and food sectors and the economy. [cited 21 Aug 2021]. Available: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/ag-and-food-sectors-and-the-economy/

3. Clapp J. CRFA — ABCD and beyond: From grain merchants to agricultural value chain managers. CanFoodStudies. 2015;2: 126–135.

4. Environment UN. UNEP Food Waste Index Report 2021. 4 Mar 2021 [cited 21 Aug 2021]. Available: https://www.unep.org/resources/report/unep-food-waste-index-report-2021

5. Document card. [cited 21 Aug 2021]. Available: http://www.fao.org/documents/card/en/c/ca9934en

6. Pylianidis C, Osinga S, Athanasiadis IN. Introducing digital twins to agriculture. Comput Electron Agric. 2021;184: 105942.

7. Verdouw C, Tekinerdogan B, Beulens A, Wolfert S. Digital twins in smart farming. Agric Syst. 2021;189: 103046.

8. Defraeye T, Shrivastava C, Berry T, Verboven P, Onwude D, Schudel S, et al. Digital twins are coming: Will we need them in supply chains of fresh horticultural produce? Trends Food Sci Technol. 2021;109: 245–258.

9. Semianiaka N, Silina E. The role of global data identification standards for supply chain visibility: the case of GS1. 2012. Available: https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2:578565