Published Mar 1, 2021
I have been working in AgTech for almost 3 years now. While working in this field I have learned that there is a lot more data in agriculture than I thought. We collect data for moisture, weather, gps, equipment, imagery, soil, geospatial and more. All of this is used by agronomists, farmers, sales and insurance to run their operations for farming.
Lately, I have been researching blockchain, and trying to see what is going on in that space. I’ve been reading books, white papers, websites, watching videos. Really whatever I can handle. While researching, I was trying to think of how AgTech would look like in this world. A world where data is open, transparent and rapidly being developed. There were two real possibilities that I have been thinking about.
First, a protocol used for decentralization, where farmers own the data for their land and will be compensated for this. Right now farmers are going to AgTech companies and paying for the extraction of their farms data. Im not saying this is bad, these companies offer a lot of services as well in their packages that go beyond collecting data. At the end of the day though, its data these companies get to use to train machine learning models, and create new products. There is a bit of a power imbalance here. With this power imbalance in mind, there may be space to build a protocol or smart contracts that allow farmers to profit off of their data which is being provided for this type of venture. Instead, farmers could just pay for the equipment, and services used to extract this data. This would mean they now have custody over their data, and are able to monetize it for the training of AI, models, carbon credit, and so many other applications that would consume this. This would have the potential to restore the power balance in the transaction of value.
Second, these companies or individuals could monetize their data through oracle networks like Chainlink. Smart contracts will be created in agriculture that farmers will inevitably use. Let’s take crop insurance as an example. In this scenario an AgTech company or an individual could use oracles to provide data that would be necessary for smart contract for an insurance claim. This data could be things like moisture, product application, crop, weather, irrigation, area. This would allow them to have accurate verifiable claims in the case of something like hail damage for example. This data could be used in supply chain blockchains like VeChain. Oracles seem like a great application for this industry for people to monetize their data.
As I continue down this research journey, I will definitely continue to try and log my ideas here to expand on. This has all been very eye opening on what is being built, and it excites the hell out of me.