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FarmERP Gears Up For The Future As Top Executives From Cognizant And SAP Join Them
FarmERP’s main focus lies in rigorous technology-intensive transformation of agriculture and agribusinesses, through the latest advancements including the Internet of Agricultural Things, AI, Blockchain and Machine Learning
FarmERP’s main focus lies in rigorous technology-intensive transformation of agriculture and agribusinesses, through the latest advancements including the Internet of Agricultural Things, AI, Blockchain, and Machine Learning. To enable revolutionary ease within the management system, FarmERP welcomed Mr. Abhijeet Dange and Mr. Vikram Metkari on board.
The team at FarmERP recently announced the appointment of Mr. Abhijeet Dange as the Associate Vice President for Delivery at the organization. With vast experience in banking and financial services, learning, and talent development for over 22 years while working for organizations like Cognizant and Silverline, he has immense knowledge about handling large offshore customer engagements.
On his appointment, Mr. Dange quoted, “With the knowledge I possess, I aim to help in maintaining FarmERP’s competitive advantage by effectively aiding the growth of agribusinesses through cutting edge technology platforms.”
Mr. Sanjay Borkar, the CEO of the Indian-grown 2001 brand believes that, apart from being a strong leader with excellent people management skills, with his expertise in streamlining digital IT transformations, Mr. Abhijeet will play a crucial role in uncomplicating complex product management for FarmERP.
The team also welcomed on board Mr. Vikram Metkari as the Head of Sales and Marketing, who shares the same passion that the co-founders of the organization do, for transforming the inner workings of agriculture through the use of tech platforms. Mr. Metkari, an MBA and BE professional with rich work experience in marketing, sales, and business strategy, is a self-motivated and confident leader. He is not only a keen planner and strategist, but also an articulate communicator offering high- caliber presentations, negotiations, and analytical skills.
Mr. Santosh Shinde, the COO of FarmERP believes that Mr. Metkari’s extensive experience of working for various companies- both smaller organizations and world leaders like SAP and Vodafone in the IT & Telecom domain will enable him to guide, innovate, build, and provide value to agribusiness' customers by strengthening FarmERP's existing leadership in the domain.
With the valuable addition of both these members to the team at FarmERP, striving to make a difference and create an impact in these testing times, and the immense experience and culmination of expertise that they bring to the table, the management is now stronger than ever.
FarmERP is a leading smart agriculture management ERP technology platform. It was incepted as a part of Shivrai Technologies more than a decade ago and is currently deployed in 25 countries, assisting a variety of agribusinesses.
FarmERP is a pioneered effort by engineers, classmates, and now partners, Mr. Sanjay Borkar and Mr. Santosh Shinde. Both coming from an agricultural background, they were and are well aware of the toils and troubles that the agricultural sector faces on a daily basis. They turned to technology as a helping hand and as a partner.
Due to the connection, both personal and professional that they have towards the agricultural sector, it makes each individual work that much harder towards achieving the long-term goals they stand for. Aiming at the revolutionizing of the practices the agriculture sector follows as of date, FarmERP strives to make considerable progress in the agri-sectors they work with, while actively trying to incorporate their offerings with additional sectors as well since they are a platform which can accommodate the personality of numerous agribusinesses.
Vertical Farming, Blockchain And The Circular Economy Are Bringing ‘Farm to Table’ Into The 21st Century
Your groceries are getting a 21st-century reboot thanks to a new research centre focused on the future of food.
Australia’s population is forecast to hit 30 million by 2029 and reach almost 50 million – double the current population – by 2066. That’s a lot of mouths to feed, and with most of this growth concentrated in cities, the question needs to be asked: how can food production keep pace?
A new Future Food Systems Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) has received funding to the tune of $35 million to help answer that question over the course of the next decade.
The new CRC will focus on advanced food manufacturing, as well as how the sector can be more sustainable as Australia’s population continues to grow.
A cornucopia of challenges
Modern food production faces problems on many fronts. Growing populations demand increased output. Meanwhile, fewer people are choosing a life on the land, and climate change will create obstacles, some of which are hard to predict.
Minister for Industry, Science and Technology Karen Andrews said the new Future Food Systems CRC is designed to help Australia stay on the front foot in this area by bringing industry and research together.
“What we have to do is make sure we are looking towards the future and we’re clear what the issues are that we need to address,” she said at the launch event at UNSW.
These challenges include boosting the productivity of regional and peri-urban food systems, making it easier for innovators to bring their prototypes to market, and managing farm-to-table supply chains with extreme accuracy.
The CRC will initially work with regional stakeholders in six ‘food hubs’ to apply the latest innovations in advanced manufacturing, logistics and food science to farms, greenhouse complexes, factories and freight.
Besides putting food on local tables, streamlining food systems and making them more sustainable would place Australia in a good position to become the breadbasket of Asia.
“If I look at food in particular, we have almost half of the world’s population directly north of us … Australia is ideally located to play a key role in this area,” Andrews said.
Agriculture 2.0
This investment comes with opportunities for engineers who are interested in the intersection of food and technology. From genetic engineering to robotics, there are myriad forms this research can take. UNSW Engineering Dean Professor Mark Hoffman said this will be achieved through partnerships between engineers, technologists and primary producers.
“This CRC will move Australia into a new era of high-technology food production, transforming one of our most important industries and reinforcing our place as a major world food producer,” Hoffman said.
Plans are already in place for developing high-tech agrifood precincts in Liverpool, NSW, and Peel, WA. The Liverpool precinct will be developed in parallel with the new Aerotropolis in western Sydney. Developing these precincts includes providing design and circular economy solutions for water and energy use.
The Future Food Systems CRC website states it will partner with major growers and technology entrepreneurs to develop indoor and vertical farming facilities to increase the amount of food production taking place near existing infrastructure. Developing indoor urban agriculture could be worth up to $395 billion globally by 2030, according to a Food Innovation Australia report.
Circular economy solutions like water recycling, renewable energy and water management will facilitate this. Blockchain platforms and automation will also make an appearance as the CRC works with freight and logistics providers to get goods from A to B.
Queensland University of Technology’s Professor Doug Baker, who is also involved in the project, said there needs to be more integration between planning policy, design and infrastructure, and high-tech growing facilities around transport hubs.
“It’s about being smarter with agriculture and infrastructure, and integrating technology and robotics into that,” he said.
He said an example of a well-integrated future food system was automated, vertical-farming greenhouses located near airports or ports so crops could be picked, packed and shipped with minimal fuss.
Dr Chris Lehnert, a robotics researcher at the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision, sees enormous potential for robotics and automation in future food systems, particularly indoor protected cropping.
“The future potential of robotics in indoor protected cropping will be their ability to intelligently sense, think and act in order to reduce production costs and maximise output value in terms of crop yield and quality,” he said.
To further build this capability, the CRC will support 60 PhD students and train future generations interested in using technology to create more sustainable food production systems.
This funding, which will be doled out over the next decade, is on top of $149.6 million the CRC has previously received from more than 60 industry partners interested in this work.
Rachael is the digital editor for create. She loves having a job that lets her go down rabbit holes, ask interesting people (hopefully) interesting questions, and indulge her need to know why things are they way they are and how they got that way.
Tags: AGRICULTURE AGTECH AUTOMATION CIRCULAR ECONO MYFOOD ENGINEERING MANUFACTURING RESOURCE MANAGEMENT ROBOTICS SUPPLY CHAINS SUSTAINABILITY SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS
Second Greenhouse Heated by Cryptocurrency Mining
UnitedCorp's technology uses the heat from cryptocurrency mining to support greenhouse agricultural operations
Miami-based United American Corp announces the completion of its second BlockchainDome and the full commissioning of 1,500 additional miners for a total of 2,500 miners (3.8 megawatts) now in service in two BlockchainDomes. Pre-installation of 1.5 megawatts of electrical service for adjacent greenhouses heated by the BlockchainDomes is now also complete.
The latest BlockchainDome incorporates a number of improvements in construction and deployment from the first dome which includes mass pre-fabrication of a number of dome components and in-house CNC manufacturing of the mining rig docking stations. Construction logistics have also been refined to include pre-installation of foundations and utilities for future domes resulting in overall lower construction costs and shorter construction timelines.
"We have taken everything we have learned from the construction of the first BlockchainDome and used this knowledge to make the implementation of this subsequent BlockchainDomes faster, cheaper and of better quality," stated UnitedCorp CEO Benoit Laliberte. "Along with the generation of heat from the BlockchainDomes for agricultural purposes, our goal remains to be the low cost and environmentally sustainable standard for the industry."
UnitedCorp's technology uses the heat from cryptocurrency mining to support greenhouse agricultural operations through the BlockchainDome Heat Station system which keeps greenhouses at 20oC year-round. This represents a simple design solution compared to various alternatives whereby the cost of generating this heat from a single source is shared between multiple use cases.
Commercial greenhouses in cooler climates like in the Province of Quebec typically require a significant amount of thermal energy to supplement daytime solar energy, particularly during the period of September to May, and many older greenhouses utilize inefficient heating systems for this purpose. The dry heat produced by the BlockchainDome Heat Station is also used in the summer to reduce greenhouse mold and fungus caused by condensation thereby reducing or eliminating the need for chemicals to treat this problem and creating a more organic growth environment.
UnitedCorp believes this "Heat Campus" approach for heat generation and utilization is the future for agriculture and any other industry that can make use of low-cost heat with the ultimate goal being to get as close zero waste as possible. This is not only good economically but allows businesses to "green" their operations by significantly reducing the amount of electricity the combined operations require from the grid.
For more information:
UnitedCorp
5201 Blue Lagoon Drive, 8th floor,
Miami FL 33126
www.unitedcorp.com
Can Blockchain And Indoor Farming Help Feed Nine Billion
There are better ways to manage wheat and other crops. Photo: Pavo
Can Blockchain And Indoor Farming Help Feed Nine Billion?
By 2050, the world’s population may exceed nine billion people, 70% of which will be urban. Food production has to increase and blockchain may help
By ERHAN CAKMAK APRIL 25, 2018
- By 2050, the UN says the world’s population will exceed nine billion, some 20% more than today. Most of this population increase will occur in rapidly-urbanizing developing countries.
The World Health Organization estimates that 70% of the world’s population will be urban by 2050, compared with roughly half today. To feed this larger and more urban population, food production must increase by 70%.
Annual cereal production will need to rise 50% to support population growth, despite the fact that yield growth has been steadily declining.
Blockchain-enabled applications will play an important role in addressing this challenge. Food supply chains are inefficient and suffer from quality control problems, especially in developing nations. One of the clearest real-world applications of blockchain technology is to add greater visibility and efficiency across supply chains.
Although agriculture is a $5.5 trillion global business, employing more than one billion people, it remains highly inefficient. For many smallholder farmers in developing countries, affordable access to capital remains a huge challenge.
Blockchain solutions can solve these financing difficulties. As it stands, farmers often wait weeks or months for payment after delivery and this forces them to deal through larger players with greater bargaining power. This directly translates to lower income for farmers, as they do not receive their fair share despite being the most important part of the chain.
As the world urbanizes and becomes more conscious of the carbon footprint of transporting goods over long distances, indoor farming is playing an increasing role. Blockchain solutions and smart contracts allow for careful management of water and energy. Automated data collection and analysis creates the ability to better manage crop inputs, like water and energy, and the corresponding automation of indoor farming operations.
For example, a farmer using indoor hydroponics and a closed loop system may be able to reduce water usage by up to 90%. Increasingly, global food demands will be met by crops grown indoors, in environments more efficient and more controlled than the outdoors. By moving plants indoors, traditional dependence on the weather can be eliminated. With sensor arrays, plants can “communicate” precisely what they need 24/7.
Blockchain solutions and the “Internet of Things” (IoT) will save time and money for farmers and increase yields. Despite a common belief that farmers are slow to adapt, they have always been eager adopters of technologies that make sense and deliver genuine value. Data democratization of the food chain will increase efficiencies, reduce waste and increasingly transfer remuneration to the stakeholders delivering the greatest value.
Blockchain solutions allow to build a new model of trust in agricultural supply chains. Under the old Information Technology paradigm, agricultural, environmental and regulatory data is stored on centralized computer servers and managed by administrators trusted to maintain data integrity, security and access authorization.
This centralized data administration is a source of risk – data on crop safety and quality data. Data can be lost due to failed or absent back-ups. Centralized administrators may act on their own agendas, with their own interests in mind, impacting decisions related to data access and security.
Applying blockchain technology to crop data ensures that information about our food and its sources is incorruptible. Blockchain and IoT technology simplifies data management throughout the complex system of farmers, brokers, distributors, processors, retailers, regulators and consumers. Information on the food we eat becomes simplified and transparent. Consumers can enjoy greater trust in the food they put on their table and regulatory agencies gain greater confidence in the data reported to them.
Blockchain redefines trust across the agriculture spectrum with arm’s length cryptographic security, eliminating any potential pursuits of self-interest on the part of data administrators or other actors.
Blockchain enables real-time payments concurrent with delivery and better visibility to buyers, leveling the playing field for farmers. Farmers get paid sooner and increased competition for their crops raises the prices they receive while simultaneously helping consumers to pay lower prices for food through a much more transparent, secure and environmentally sustainable supply chain.
Erhan Cakmak is CEO of Pavo, that is working to provide IoT blockchain solutions for the global agriculture ecosystem.
Please contact us with feedback, news or stories: thechain@atimes.com
What is Blockchain Technology? A Beginner’s Guide
You may have heard the term “blockchain technology” before, in reference to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. For the uninitiated, the term might seem abstract with little real meaning on the surface. However, blockchain technology is a critical element of cryptocurrencies — without it, digital currencies like Bitcoin would not exist.
What is Blockchain Technology? A Beginner’s Guide
written by Chantelle Lafaille February 18, 2018
You may have heard the term “blockchain technology” before, in reference to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. For the uninitiated, the term might seem abstract with little real meaning on the surface. However, blockchain technology is a critical element of cryptocurrencies — without it, digital currencies like Bitcoin would not exist.
If you are new to cryptocurrencies, and new to blockchain technology, read this guide on the basics to get yourself started. If you are already a seasoned trader, maybe you’ll learn a thing or two you didn’t already know.
A Brief History of Blockchain
To start, let’s talk about the history of the blockchain. Before it was ever used in cryptocurrency, it had humble beginnings as a concept in computer science — particularly, in the domains of cryptography and data structures.
The very primitive form of the blockchain was the hash tree, also known as a Merkle tree. This data structure was patented by Ralph Merkle in 1979, and functioned by verifying and handling data between computer systems. In a peer-to-peer network of computers, validating data was important to make sure nothing was altered or changed during transfer. It also helped to ensure that false data was not sent. In essence, it is used to maintain and prove the integrity of data being shared.
In 1991, the Merkle tree was used to create a “secured chain of blocks” — a series of data records, each connected to the one before it. The newest record in this chain would contain the history of the entire chain. And thus, the blockchain was created.
In 2008, Satoshi Nakamato conceptualized the distributed blockchain. It would contain a secure history of data exchanges, utilize a peer-to-peer network to time stamp and verify each exchange, and could be managed autonomously without a central authority. This became the backbone of Bitcoin. And thus, the blockchain we know today was born, as well as the world of cryptocurrencies.
How Does Blockchain Work?
So, then, how does the blockchain work? Let’s recall a few key features before we get into the details:
1. Blockchain keeps a record of all data exchanges — this record is referred to as a “ledger” in the cryptocurrency world, and each data exchange is a “transaction“. Every verified transaction is added to the ledger as a “block”
2. It utilizes a distributed system to verify each transaction — a peer-to-peer network of nodes
3. Once signed and verified, the new transaction is added to the blockchain and can not be altered
To begin, we need to explore the concept of “keys”. With a set of cryptographic keys, you get a unique identity. Your keys are the Private Key and Public Key, and together they are combined to give you a digital signature. Your public key is how others are able to identify you. Your private key gives you the power to digitally sign and authorize different actions on behalf of this digital identity when used with your public key.
In the cryptocurrency world, this represents your wallet address (public key) and your private key is what let’s you authorize transfers, withdrawals, and other actions with your digital property like cryptocurrencies. As an aside, this is why it’s so important to keep your private key safe — anyone who has your private key can use it to access any of your digital assets associated with your public key and do what they want with it!
Everytime a transaction occurs, that transaction is signed by whoever is authorizing it. That transaction might be something like “Alice is sending Bob 0.4 BTC”, will include Bob’s address (public key), and will be signed by a digital signature using both Alice’s public key and private key. This gets added to the ledger of that blockchain that Alice sent Bob 0.4 BTC, and will also include a timestamp and a unique ID number. When this transaction occurs, it’s broadcasted to a peer-to-peer network of nodes — basically other digital entities that acknowledge that this transaction has occurred and adds it to the ledger.
Each transaction in that ledger will have the same data: a digital signature, a public key, a timestamp, and a unique ID. Each transaction will be connected, so if you move back one transaction in the ledger, you may see that Chuck sent Alice 0.8 BTC at some time. If you move back another transaction, you might see that Dan sent Chuck 0.2 BTC at some other time before that.
The anonymity of cryptocurrencies come from the fact that your public key is just a randomized sequence of numbers and letters — so you are not literally signing with your own name or some sort of handle. A public key doesn’t tell you the real identity of the person behind it. You are also more or less free to generate as many key pairs as you want and have multiple cryptocurrency wallets. Be warned though, there could be other ways someone can figure out your identity — for example, through your spending habits.
Why is Decentralization So Important?
For enthusiasts of blockchain, you will hear a lot about the decentralized aspect of it. What makes this so appealing is that it makes the blockchain impervious to censorship, tampering, or corruption.
Because it uses a peer-to-peer network, copies of the ledger are stored in many different locations, and unless you manage to track down every single one of them (Bitcoin is estimated to have over 35,000 nodes in its P2P network), you can’t destroy it. As well, because so many different, independent nodes are keeping track of the ledger, modifying it in an untrustworthy way won’t go very far because all the other nodes will disagree with that transaction and won’t add it to the ledger.
This is a huge part of why so many people believe blockchain technology is the future of currency, and why it is being adopted in industries other than cryptocurrency.
There’s Always a Downside
However, like any system created by humans, there are always downsides.
Blockchain technology has a pretty steep learning curve. Especially for the typical individual without a technical background, all the jargon and computer science concepts involved may intimidate and scare away otherwise would-be users. However, the rising popularity of cryptocurrency is resulting in the blockchain moving into the mainstream, with a lot more resources available to make the topic more approachable.
Transferring, trading, and buying cryptocurrencies usually involves a transaction fee, and is not usually instantaneous. The former can be costly, the latter inconvenient.
There is also a concept called the “51% attack” — if for some reason 51% of a peer-to-peer network validates an otherwise invalid transaction, it will still get approved and added to the ledger by nature of how the validation process works. Maybe right now it’s unlikely to happen, but it is a security flaw that might have potential for exploitation in the future.
However, there are a lot of developers, users, and enthusiasts who truly believe blockchain technology is the future. Many want to see the technology succeed, so stay tuned for new developments!
Related: What Exactly Is Blockchain, Anyway?
Chantelle is a computer engineering student with over three years of experience writing for science and technology outlets, and a cryptocurrency enthusiast. When she isn't busy keeping up with the latest news in the tech world, she is busy pursuing her space engineer ambitions.
WALMART The World’s Biggest Retailer Wants To Bring Blockchains To The Food Business
The Beijing center, the first of its kind for Walmart, opened in 2016. The retail giant committed $25 million over five years to the facility after a number of food safety scandals
WALMART The World’s Biggest Retailer Wants To Bring Blockchains To The Food Business
By Joon Ian Wong | Illustrations by Justine Shirin
Beijing, China
I’m at Walmart’s global food safety collaboration center, housed in a nondescript office tower downtown, on a rainy Beijing summer day. I meet with Frank Yiannas, VP of food safety at Walmart. He’s fresh off a flight from Bentonville, Arkansas—Walmart’s headquarters—and is in Beijing for a quarterly meeting of the board that oversees the center. He’s keen to underline China’s importance in the world’s future food supply landscape. “It’s such an important and expanding economy in the global 21st-century food system,” he says. “The 21st-century food system—China will play a huge role in it.”
And Yiannas is right. Chinese take their food safety seriously. After dozens of scares involving “fake” food—from eggs to infant formula—Chinese consumers place a premium on food products that come from what are perceived to be trusted sources. That’s why there’s a roaring trade in baby milk powder, from Hong Kong and Australia, on the mainland. It’s so big that the Chinese government changed tax rules in 2016 to clamp down on the grey market for imported baby milk formula.
That’s partly why Yiannas chose to launch Walmart’s blockchain ambitions in Beijing, with a pilot project that tracked packages of pork—China’s most popular meat—from farm to supermarket shelf. The pilot was successful enough to trigger a second trial, this time with mangoes in central America, which was successful as well.
We’re talking in the food safety collaboration center. Instead of a lab filled with scientists testing meat or vegetables for toxins, it’s really just a series of meeting rooms, much like any co-working space across the Chinese capital. “We certainly could have built a lab,” Yiannas tells me, but Walmart was less interested in using the center to focus on the science of food safety, and more on the links in the chain that get food from place to place. “Some companies will do food-safety work in a silo,” he says. “We reach out to the suppliers, the consumer groups.”
The Beijing center, the first of its kind for Walmart, opened in 2016. The retail giant committed $25 million over five years to the facility after a number of food safety scandals—from mislabeling of organic pork to selling expired duck meat—plagued the country. Walmart’s goal is to convene the world’s food safety experts to figure out ways to track the provenance of a package of food—be it mangoes or pork ribs—with new techniques and systems.
Walmart’s blockchain project could fundamentally alter the way information is secured, stored, and shared across the food and retail industry.
One of Walmart’s grandest projects is an attempt to graft a blockchain, that immutable cryptographic ledger first used by bitcoin, onto the world’s complex food supply chains. Walmart has roped in some of the industry’s biggest players, among them fruit producer Dole, consumer goods giant Unilever, and Swiss water and food conglomerate Nestle, to form a consortium of 10 food producers and retailers to make it a reality. They’re building the technology with IBM, which has been among the most active technology firms pushing blockchain solutions to corporate technology departments. If Walmart is successful, the project could fundamentally alter the way information is secured, stored, and shared across the food and retail industry, ushering in an era where an item of produce can be tracked in real-time from farm to table, by producers and consumers.
THE PROBLEM WITH SUPPLY CHAINS
To hear logistics experts describe the links of warehouses, container ships, trucks, and cargo planes that deliver our food to us, it’s a wonder anything makes it onto our shelves at all. It’s a mess of phone calls, hand-written forms, and, yes, the much maligned fax machine. Retailers and food suppliers can spend millions of man-hours a year on food traceability, says Yiannas.
Food supply chains are complex affairs that have only become more intricate over the last decades. “The fundamental problem with supply chains is that information is captured in silos,” says Steve Rogers, an IBM supply chain expert. “The globalization of supply chains has just made that worse over the last 15 to 20 years.”
Collaboration—or the lack of it—is the reason why current food safety systems take so long to trace a product’s provenance.
Collaboration—or the lack of it—is the reason why current food safety systems take so long to trace a product’s provenance. Yiannas describes a landscape for food safety systems that’s fragmented, with each producer or retailer using its own systems to track products. The problem begins when an item leaves one producer’s system and is entered into another’s, with no traceability between the two systems. “It’s very linear data capture. It’s siloed in Walmart’s system, or another retailer’s system, and there’s no connection,” he says. “With blockchain, it’s different. It’s fundamentally about networks.”
Rogers describes the complexities of even a basic food supply chain: “Think of a farm that may be selling to three or four different wholesale buyers. They may then be distributing to multiple different packagers, who eventually package it for different brands. And then another set of logistics is going on, and eventually it gets to a store.”
In January 2016, a listeria contamination caused at least one death and dozens of hospitalizations in the US. This came 10 years after an e. coli outbreak from contaminated spinach, which infected 199 people. The first cases of the e. coli outbreak were reported in mid-August, but it was only in early October that the Centers for Disease Control issued a warning. Rogers says greater supply-chain transparency would have tightened the “containment ring” and minimized infections. “When you don’t have the information, your containment ring becomes extremely large and costly. With knowledge, you can draw a much tighter containment ring and hopefully you can isolate it quickly,” he says.
Rogers and Yiannas are betting on blockchains to do this. But it didn’t come easy for these veterans of the logistics and food businesses. “I was a naysayer, I was so skeptical,” Yiannas says of the time IBM first gave a presentation about the technology to him. “I became a believer when I started to understand how blockchain worked,” he says. “It solves not only digitizing food information but it addresses the social issue of how that information is shared.”
“Blockchain tech is designed to solve the problem of coordinating members of a group who don’t necessarily trust each other.”
The “collaboration” bit of Walmart’s food safety center in Beijing also goes some way to explaining why a blockchain is a good fit for it. Blockchain tech is designed to solve the problem of coordinating members of a group who don’t necessarily trust each other. In the case of bitcoin, it allows anonymous strangers to send digital money to one another while eliminating the possibility of one party cheating another by spending funds that they don’t have, for example. That principle has been seized on by other industries, from finance to shipping, as a way to solve coordination and issues of trust globally.
There are trials from the shipping line Maersk and work by Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com. The latter has a blockchain, live since May of 2017, tracking the delivery of frozen beef from the steppes of Inner Mongolia to supermarket shelves in China’s megacities of Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. Fellow e-commerce giant Alibaba has announced plans to do something similar, but with beef products from Australia.
“Companies have been digitizing information on the supply chain for two decades,” he says. “That’s not new. What we didn’t believe—but what we saw—is that the fundamentals of how blockchain works are different.” He talked about the glut of horse meat fraudulently mixed into processed meat products across Europe in recent years. “[Blockchain] is like shining a light on each point of the food system that could deter those types of incidents.”
WHAT’S A BLOCKCHAIN, ANYWAY?
At this stage, some explanation of what exactly a blockchain is is in order. First of all, there is no single, monolithic blockchain. Different cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoin or ethereum, have separate blockchains. When people refer to “the blockchain” they may be referring to the oldest and most popular one, which is the bitcoin blockchain, or using it as a generic term for blockchains in general.
In the case of a cryptocurrency like bitcoin, it might be helpful to think of a blockchain as a byproduct of bitcoin transactions. How does this happen? Each bitcoin transaction is recorded in a ledger—its blockchain—that is shared among all the computers that make up the bitcoin network globally. Bitcoin’s ledger is made up of chunks of data—blocks—that when strung together form a history of every transaction ever made by anyone with bitcoin. This string of blocks is bitcoin’s blockchain. (Here’s our in-depth explainer on how transactions are added, or mined, in bitcoin.)
How do you create a blockchain without the speculation and mania linked to bitcoin?
Since bitcoin was created nine years ago by the still-anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto as a tool to side-step banks and state-issued money, it has increasingly been embraced by the very institutions it was designed to disrupt. From Wall Street to the world’s biggest corporations, executives tasked with bringing innovation to their companies began talking about “blockchain technology” as an idea distinct from the cryptocurrencies that introduced it.
The idea is to reverse engineer a blockchain and extract the best features while leaving the rest behind for the anarchists and libertarians of the bitcoin world.The challenge is this: How do you create a blockchain without the speculation and mania linked to bitcoin? Instead of a blockchain being merely a record of bitcoin’s transactions, executives wanted a blockchain that could deal with existing, real-world assets to suit their own needs. That might be streamlining supply chains, automating banking back-room operations, or tracking diamonds.
MARRYING BLOCKCHAINS WITH SUPPLY CHAINS
The reason corporations think a blockchain could solve their supply chain problems can be summed up in one word: trust. It’s what blockchains were designed for—getting a bunch of counter-parties to agree on a set of transactions. That’s why bitcoin users, for example, can stay semi-anonymous.
In the same way, corporate blockchains would allow a vast network—from farmers to trucking companies to warehouse staff—to trust that a product has passed through a link in the chain and been processed in a particular way. Blockchains used by corporations are closed and can avoid the energy-intensive expense involved with “mining,” or doing the computing necessary to solve the cryptographic puzzle associated with bitcoin.
Blockchains for corporations have another critical property: greater privacy. While it may sound counterintuitive, corporations are even more sensitive over transaction data than, say, a dark web user who’s buying illicit drugs with bitcoin. When corporations first began to explore blockchain technology, they were keen to build in a layer of privacy over transaction data. That’s what consortia like R3, or the open-source Hyperledger project, have developed in the blockchain solutions they market to companies.
WHAT WALMART AND IBM ARE DOING
To understand what Walmart’s experiments with blockchain technology looked like, I went to IBM’s research lab in Zhongguancun, which has been called China’s Silicon Valley because of the sheer number of technology giants headquartered there. There, I met with the team of research scientists and executives who worked with Walmart to develop a blockchain solution based on the open-source Hyperledger codebase.
Jin Dong, the associate director at IBM Research who led the effort, walked me through the process of putting Walmart’s pork on a blockchain. Data about the pork product, from the farm inspection report to the livestock quarantine certificate, are digitized by an “industrial personal digital assistant,” which basically looks like a smartphone in a rugged case. It emits a laser to scan barcodes rapidly. These data are then uploaded in real-time to Walmart’s blockchain. The farm is operated by a company called Jin Luo, and this particular farm is located in Lingyi city in northeastern China.
“The nature of blockchain ensures the data put into a blockchain can hardly be changed and can be stored forever.”
The other key link in this process are the drivers. They are charged with not only transporting the product but bringing along the necessary documentation for each batch of products. With the blockchain pilot, they were asked to take photographs of the various certificates as they transported them from place to place, where they would be stamped. This verified that the products were moving along the supply chain. “If someone is looking for specific documents, it takes a lot of time to locate them,” Dong said. Digitized documents stored on a blockchain and linked to a particular batch of products removes that pain point, he said.
As the pork products wend their way to a Walmart distribution center, and ultimately, the shelves of a Walmart store, they have passed through dozens of hands. But the blockchain pilot allowed the progress of each batch of products leaving the farm to be tracked, in real-time, across the country. Once the products reach individual stores, they are repackaged and distributed across the shop floor. The pilot doesn’t track individual retail packages, IBM said, although the level of detail in the data is sufficient to track a particular retail package back to the farm. Changrui Ren, an IBM Research executive who worked on the project said, “The nature of blockchain ensures the data put into a blockchain can hardly be changed and can be stored forever,” he said.
THE COMPLEXITIES OF SLICED MANGOES
After the Chinese pork pilot, Walmart ran a larger scale test tracking mangoes from Central America. “We picked mangoes because it was more complex,” Yiannas says. “It was sliced mangoes.” The fruit is grown by small farmers, transported to a “packing house” where they are washed, then moved across the US border. They are then stored in refrigerated warehouses, and eventually end up at a Walmart supplier where they are sliced and packaged. “You can see how many layers it takes to get those mangoes from farm to table,” he says.
Current rules for food traceability require a retailer to be able to see one step forward and one step back in the chain.
Current rules for food traceability require a retailer to be able to see one step forward and one step back in the chain. That means Walmart would only be required to know which importer handled a particular package of mangoes, but wouldn’t necessarily know which packing house it came from, or which farm. “It’s almost impossible to have a clear view of where this food came from,” Yiannas says.
Yiannas decided to put his team, and the blockchain they had built, to the test. He bought a packet of sliced mangoes and brought it to the office. “I told them to trace it back to the farm,” he says. After numerous phone calls, faxes, and emails, the results were in—six days, 18 hours, and 26 minutes later. “Those records had to be pursued,” he says. He then did a live demonstration of the blockchain system in front of the media, tracing the same packet of sliced mangoes. “We put in the code, and we traced it back to the farm in 2.2 seconds,” he says. “So we’ve gone from seven days to 2.2 seconds. This isn’t a lab. This isn’t theory. This is the real world.”
Every second matters, Yiannis says, because in a real food contamination situation, it could mean the difference between many more sick consumers, and farmers being forced to stop supplying their produce for fear they were the source of the contamination. “Imagine if there was a food scare and you didn’t know where the contaminated mangoes came from,” he says. “Seven days is a long time.”
“A blockchain solution is the foundation to creating a smarter food system for the future.”
Even the best blockchain architecture would be useless if producers and retailers couldn’t agree on how to use it. That’s why Yiannas pushed to create a consortium with other food companies—something that’s easier to do when you’re the world’s largest retailer by sales. “The blockchain solution we’re working on is the foundation to creating a smarter food system for the future,” he says. He envisions packing pallets with thermometers that transmit their cargo’s temperature instantly, and all that data stored on a blockchain can be accessed by customs officials, regulators, and consumers.
But in order for that data to be make any sense when it’s shared across silos, it has to be captured and formatted in standard ways. “Any companies working on [blockchain tech for food chains] need to base it on established standards,” he says. “Some new standards will need to be created, but I don’t think it will be that hard. The food industry has been working on this.”
SOME SKEPTICISM
Some industry observers think blockchain’s potential in logistics has been overhyped. Gartner’s Ray Valdes, who covers blockchain projects for the research firm, says that many supply chain projects could just as easily be executed on a traditional database. “Ninety percent of enterprise blockchain projects today don’t need a blockchain, and would be better off without one because they are not aligned with what blockchain can actually do,” he says. Valdes says he advises most clients against using a blockchain in their technology system. “If I can save them $1 million on a pointless blockchain project, that’s our value,” he says.
When it comes to supply chains, Valdes believes that blockchains could play an important coordinating role. “If you have a fragmented business ecosystem, with many parties who don’t know each other but need to do business, then they could collaborate through a blockchain,” he says. But there’s a catch. “It’s a ‘boil the ocean’ problem,” he says, meaning that it’ll take fundamental shifts in an industry for adoption to take place. Optimistically, he says, it would take a decade for the industry to rearrange itself so that everyone was logging interactions on a blockchain.
Valdes argues that a company as dominant as Walmart doesn’t need its suppliers on a blockchain. It can simply ask its vendors to use whatever system it chooses. “They have been very successful because over the years they have built a robust system of record for their supply chain,” he says. “If you were a supplier to them, you would happily accept their centralized version of the truth.”
But in Yiannas’ mind, blockchains solve the very thing that prevent databases from being built and shared between companies: trust. He told me about his quest for the perfect food traceability system. “I’ve looked at them all,” he says. “I’ve been in pursuit of the holy grail.”
Blockchains, because they are designed for collaboration, could change all that, and not just for the Walmarts, Unilevers, and IBMs of the world. “It’s a new way of democratizing how data is captured and shared,” Yiannas says. “It’s a game-changer in that it’s adding value to all the participants.” Yiannas puts blockchain tech on the same scale as cellphones when it comes to digital disruption. “Imagine a digitally transparent system connecting farmers and buyers,” he says. “One of the best things that has happened to farmers in small economies is just giving them a cellphone so they can connect with buyers.”
The unlikely factor aligning a Walmart food executive and a mango farmer in central America, then, may turn out to be an accounting device that was first given expression in a stateless cryptocurrency, but which may turn out to be critical in resolving one of the food industry’s most vexing problems.