- In Norway, IOTA has found a new partner with the Future Farm Consortium that intends to digitize agriculture.
- The IOTA Tange protocol will be used as a data pipeline and to ensure data integrity.
The IOTA team continues to work on finding new use cases and new partners worldwide for the IOTA Tangle protocol. As the IOTA Foundation announced in a blog post yesterday, it has found a new partner in the field of agriculture. In Norway, IOTA has partnered with the Futures Farm Consortium to implement a pilot project using IOTA’s Distributed Ledger technology to address the problems of lack of transparency and data exchange in agriculture.
The Future Farm project is a collaboration between key players in Norway such as Tine, Yara, Felleeskjøpet, the Norwegian University of Environmental and Life Sciences, Eurofins and inFuture. The project was supported by the Norwegian government with NOK 11 million (around USD 1.2 million). The aim is to help the Norwegian farmer make more profitable and climate-friendly decisions. Among other things, methane emissions will be reduced by 30 percent.
The project covers the entire value chain in the production of cow’s milk, from harvesting the grass the cow eats to the finished milk. The IOTA Tangle serves as the basis for creating data integrity and scalability for automation. In addition, greater transparency is created between all parties involved in the dairy industry.
IOTA meets farming
As IOTA states in the blog post, the first step of the cooperation was to ensure full transparency of all inputs into the process from grass to a glass of milk. The data is collected from numerous parties such as material suppliers, farmers, veterinarians, laboratories, dairies, retailers and many more. These are authenticated by the Tangle. In addition, the IOTA protocol serves as a data pipeline for each actor to share the data.
On the basis of this shared knowledge, Future Farms aims to improve the understanding of how a glass of milk is produced most effectively. The consortium estimates that a deviation from best practice costs Norwegian agriculture hundreds of millions of NOK a year. In addition, the lack of a national overview of supply and demand has a significant impact on the environment.
Ultimately, however, the benefit for farmers is that they can achieve efficiency gains and higher profits as a result of the common database, as IOTA’s contribution states:
The visibility of the quality of fodder (the round bales of harvested grass) enables better prediction of the milk quality produced at every farm, which can ultimately impact the logistics planning of pick-up milk trucks (as milk is organized and stored accordingly to different levels of quality). Better logistics planning can potentially mean less time and costs spent! Ensuring a better quality of the fodder reduces the number of methane emissions from the cows with up to 30 percent.
Furthermore, the Future Farm Consortium has set itself the task of creating a common national marketplace for round bales, where farmers can manage their round bale stock and search for available round bales. IOTA is predestined for this, not least because it has already developed the IOTA Data Marketplace and the IOTA Industry Marketplace.
The Future Farm project is initially a pilot project. As the blog post states, the real challenge is to integrate the solution along the entire value chain of farmers and all stakeholders.
The real challenge is how to integrate the solution along the full value chain of the farmers and all stakeholders involved. The true power of digital is not so much about software, but about engaging all actors and to make them share and use information.
As representatives of the software side, one of our core missions is to lower the access barriers and make the technology as easy as possible to access and work with. This is one of the core values of the IOTA Foundation: to guarantee the value of an open-source solution and the importance of feeless transactions as a critical enabler of data ecosystems.
The demo can be viewed here: https://future-farm.iota.org
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