Blockchain Of Food Supply

But. Organic is great but… Permaculture can work but... The only way is pastured raised cattle, but…

There is no certainty for what is to come, just ideas and hypothesis. No one knows anything for sure. My hunch is it will take a variety of methods adapted locally if we are going to find our way through the challenge of sustainability, and our population’s growing demand.

What is one to do when faced with all the various options? The baseline need is understanding the good and bad of each choice you make. If you chose to invest in a company that you feel is doing the right thing you need to know if they are actually following through. Deeper still you need to determine if what they are doing is a true improvement. It is completely possible to be organic while clear-cutting the rainforest. Is that something you support? The food business has a very fluid supply chain, and with so many links in the chain, there are many places that negligence and outright malice can lead to fraud.

I am guilty of this. I ran menus that were supposed to support local and sustainable practices. Sometimes the menu said something that wasn’t true. It is not a simple task to reprint menus for a large operation. A company from which I purchased sustainable dock to table fish was found to be fraudulently labeling its products. Maybe they were just trying to keep up with demand so as not to shut down the actual good they were doing. Who knows what they intended? An incident like that degrades any positive impact they had and casts doubt and distrust in the system.

Most people don’t know what it means when a product is certified by third-party organizations like USDA organic or The Marine Stewardship Council, or PA Preferred What does certified grass-fed beef or free-range chicken actually mean? Who are these organizations certifying it, what is the truth?

Trust but verify, those are wise words. This is where blockchain comes in. The blockchain, is, in essence, an automated and verifiable process that certifies a transaction between people. It also can facilitate agreements called smart contracts which will execute when all predetermined conditions are met. This information can be viewed and referred to by anyone either as a completely open system or by members of a permission-based organization. There are several companies looking into how this can help the food supply chain become more transparent.

Can blockchain produce a trusted, verifiable truth? One of the advantages of the blockchain is that it is created out of the need for mutual distrusting entities to do business with each other.

I can imagine a barcode that you scan and would give you the information that you desire for making an informed decision; there would be a place where a producer could showcase what they do in their operation, a way to connect across the food chain, interact, and virtually know your farmer.

You can go deep down the technical rabbit hole with the blockchain discussion. My layman cook understanding is that it is a record of a transaction visible to all who have access. In addition through smart contracts, transactions will not take place unless the agreed to conditions are met.

I have met many farmers and producers that decided not to go the certified route, either because of cost or their way of producing didn’t entirely fit in the box. If a restaurant or other food market has committed to using their purchasing power to reach goals you share, it would benefit them if they could ensure that what they are buying is in line with that vision. They would want to be able to demonstrate that commitment to the consumer. When we decide that it’s worth it to make an investment into a company it would be reassuring to know what it is, in fact, accomplishing.

When it comes to food supply chain there is a lot of room for embellishment, omission and outright lying. if the blockchain does become a serious part of the business infrastructure, I think there will still need to be people verifying information.

Here is an example using Hyperledger, an open source blockchain development company that has a program called Sawtooth.

Consider buying tuna for a restaurant. Normally, it would be almost impossible to trace that fish back to the origin and find any information on how it was harvested from the sea. Was it caught illegally? Was there slave labor involved? Using blockchain with the Sawtooth program a fisherman or fisherwomen could record information about each individual tuna, a unique ID, location and time of the catch, how much it weighed and who caught it. You could add to this data like toxicity, or method of catch. The boat would be able to treat the whole load as a batch. Once validated it would become a block on the ledger. This is published across the network and is visible to all parties. Regulators can access the ledger to view and verify the information. The next transaction at the processing plant will add its information, the distributor will do the same. when all preconditions and validated they will be a published to the network as new blocks. Once I receive the tuna in my restaurant I am able to access the ledger and view all the transactions along the way. If I trust the regulation that verifies the records then I can confidently serve my customers. Potentially you could allow your customers to view the ledger and they could trace it all the way back to the boat. In the case of foodborne illness, ingredients could be tracked to a back to the point of origin and all the places it has traveled along the food supply chain would be documented in the blockchain.

Our purchase decisions have impactful repercussions. We need to have trusted information.

Permaculture is rooted in system design: blockchain allows us to look at how we support selected systems through our food dollar investments. The individual systems that make up a unique design will be different across the breadth of solutions and projects. A business can present a verifiable rationale for the systems it uses.

Can that information, even using blockchain, ever be trusted? This is a key point and one I haven’t seen explained satisfactorily. I don’t see how this distributed ledger technology works, without a trusted third party verifying what is attested to on the ledger.

If you get a look at the information it might be that the sum is greater than an aspect you don’t agree with. If specific systems prove themselves to be sustainable they can be shared and supported. Maybe the feedback loop can be enhanced so the market can be responsive to demands and advertise the aspects that are working, informing each other in a business relationship of mutual profit and creation of real capital.

This is a new technology and is developing in real time. If we can figure out the verification process I could see it bringing a level of transparency and connectivity not possible since the globalization of our food supply chain.

A. Monk