There are many technology developments the blockchain makes possible, and the one I look forward to probably more than all others is the supply chain management of our food supply. Using the blockchain and smart contracts will change the agriculture industry in ways most consumers don’t even realize and in ways that will satisfy a dream I’ve had for many years - knowing exactly where my food comes from and what’s in it.
When I was a kid, we always had a garden in our backyard. It was a pretty big garden and we were able to plant beans and carrots and tomatoes and other vegetables and herbs. We picked apples and cherries from my aunt’s trees, and blackberries and strawberries from the empty field behind our house. My favorite was tomatoes. There is nothing quite like the taste of a sun ripened tomato picked fresh off the vine. As I moved into my life as an adult living in a wide variety of places, I planted my own garden as often as I could.
I also lived on an inland lake for several years and spent many hours catching catfish and perch and walleye, making some pretty delicious dinners from my catches.
I noticed something odd, when I had to buy my produce in a grocery store. It didn’t taste the same. It was bland and somehow not nearly as good as the vegetables that came from a backyard garden. The catfish tasted nothing like those I had caught myself, and the perch and walleye didn’t have the delicate flavor of those that I had pulled from the lake.
I began to wonder where my food REALLY came from. What made it taste so different. After all a carrot was a carrot wasn’t it? I began to look deeper into what went into growing the food I ate, and I was dismayed to find that most of it had been chemically treated during it’s growing cycle. Herbicides to eliminate untruly weeds, insecticides to remove six-legged pests, fertilizers to enhance tired soil. I was ingesting chemicals that I didn’t want in my food and in my body.
The most startling food related discovery I made was about beef. I was living in Wyoming and buying my beef at a local market that did its own butchering. Those beef cuts were incredibly fresh and bursting with flavor. The feedlots where cows and steers were fattened for slaughter with chemically enhanced feed sent their cattle out of state. What we bought in the local meat market grew up in open pastures, munching on decent hay and grass.
After I moved from the wide open spaces of Wyoming to a major city, I couldn’t handle the beef that was available to me. It tasted more like chewy cardboard than the fantastic flavorful beef I had been used to.
So, my vegetables, my fish, my beef, my fruit - none of it tasted anything like the fresh food I grew or picked or caught myself. I began to dream of having a small farm of my own where I could grow and raise my own food. Food that I KNEW had no chemicals, animals that were raised without antibiotic laced feed, fish that were caught from my own lake that had no fertilizer runoff or plastic waste.
That could work for me, but what about all the billions of other people in the world who were unable to do that? They would be forever stuck with factory farm products, animals pumped full of chemicals to make them grow to “kill weight” as quickly as possible, fruits and vegetables sprayed with a potpourri of fertilizers, herbicides, and insecticides, most of which were dangerous to human and animal life.
But the blockchain and smart contracts can change that. The farmer or rancher will be able to register their product, and track what has been used to raise or grow that food. That record will travel along with the produce, meat, or poultry with the distributor adding travel and distribution details to the record. When it arrives at the supermarket and is placed on the shelf for sale, that record is instantly available to the customer.
Produmex goes into detail about how this process will work. The blockchain can solve many agricultural problems faced around the world, but this tracking of everything that goes into my food, it’s source, it’s travels from the farm to my table is the one that can make my dream of knowing what is in what I put on my plate and where it came from a reality for people around the world.
Blockchain technology can solve many problems we face in the world we live in, but safer food chain is perhaps one of the most exciting and important developments there is on the blockchain.
