Community-Supported-Agriculture on Blockchain

Table of Content

Purpose

Use solidary contracts + transparent data + good-habit incentivizing to strengthen consumer-producer relationships, shorten healthy food supply chains, and grow natural-farming communities organically!

About me

I have been programming for more than 20 years, had been an academy researcher in Natural Language Processing, then lead/developed many web/mobile/game softwares. I retired at the age of 35, went to country-side and learning to be a farmer. Reason: I sat too much in front of computers and it was not good for my health.

Why am I doing this?

The more I know about mordern farming/agriculture, the more I don’t belive it won’t solve both environment reservation and food secure problems (watch EARTH FROM ABOVE > EPISODE 5: 6 BILLION MEN TO FEED to find out. Video tiếng Việt: Nông nghiệp nào để nuôi 6 tỉ người?).

The answer is coming-back to tranditional farming methods:

Video tiếng Việt: Người nông dân sinh thái: Mắt xích cho một xã hội lành mạnh

Note: I would like to use the term natural-farming to mean all of those tranditional farming methods.

The natural-farming communities now are small and need support. I would like to use my programming skill to support me as-a-future-farmer, my farmer fellows in Vietnam and the natural farmming communities in general.

Code of conducts

Principles of Teikei (JAPAN ORGANlC AGRICULTURE ASSOCIATION, NOVEMBER 1978).

Teikei - the origin of today worldwide CSA movement - did not say anything about fighting big bad corps but concentrating on the inner peace & strength of the community. It talked about mutual assistance, mutual concession, deepening friendly relationships, self-distribution, democratic management, learning, and steady development.

I will not do anything that violate or drift away from those core principles

Why Community Supported Agriculture?

Because it’s a solution to secure healthy food sources, shorten food supply-chains and encourage farmers follow natural-farming methods that already be implemented in Japan (since 1973), US (1980s), France (2001) and many other countries.

What’s CSA?

“Community supported agriculture (CSA) is a partnership between farmers and consumers in which the responsibilities, risks and rewards of farming are shared.” [1]

This rather minimalist but efficient definition opens up a large range of formal variations. Indeed, although their principles are similar, CSA farms and support groups in the various parts of Europe operate on the basis of various different models. These variations are largely based on the social, agricultural and economic specificities of each country or region where they have developed. [2]

More at localfoodproject.md#whats-csa

Why blockchain?

I belive that blockchain is a greate tool to make CSA solution more completed and effecient that can be applied worldwide. For example, in France comsumers use cheques to release money monthly to producers. In Vietnam, cheques are not in used and we Vietnamese are lacking of financing tools to do the same thing in France. Hence, smart contract can solve it seemlessly and universally.

The advantage of blockchain can bring to CSA could be:

We can come up with unlimited, creative solutions to strengthen solidary and incentive good habits. It’s the most fun of writing the smart contracts I guest.

Blockchain barriers

Farmers don’t know how to use metamask, buy ethers … It can be solved easily. In Vietnam, old-school farmers use only cash, no bank accounts. So when I want to buy from him remotely, I often ask him that does his son/daughter has bank account? can I send the money to him then you send products to me? Same solution here, we can ask farmer relatives to handle metamask/ethers for him, and we can have a technical support team to help them do that.

Second barrier is the trust on Ethereum and crytocurrency in general. People trust USD and use USD to estimate the cost, negotiate the prices … What if after they transfer money to the contract ethers go down, a lot?

What if ethers go down to zero? In this case I think the whole system stop and we are on crisis, since all money gone !!! How should we handle this situation ???

Whatever happen, I would like to implement some scheme of fail safe to make people feel secure enough to use CSA-on-Blockchain.

Essential metrics

Why metrics?

Metrics based on correct and transpent data are great tools to do accounting to anwer any “quantitative/qualitative how questions” that is a good way to “keep every stakeholders on-the-same-page”.

From general questions

To very specific ones

Why some of metrics are essential and some are not?

The anwer is depend on use-cases and people needs.

For example, while driving a car, I regularly check (g) remain gasoline, (v) current velocity, and (d) total traved distance. That my three essential metrics while driving. If one of them is wrong or broken, it may let me run in to “an unsafe situation”:

If I’m not driving, those metrics seem to irrelevant or even nonsense. For example, why-the-hell I need to check (g) gasoline while walking? :)

And if I’m driving a bus and you are a passenger. You may not care if I exceed the allowed speed or not, you may care the most if I will take you to the right place, on the right time …

Metrics for CSA

See metrics.md

Implementations

Despite the principles are the same, implementations are vary from country to country or even region to region. The platfrom (csa-on-blockchain) should have multiple implementation schemes, let communities choose the one that suitable for them, and listen to the communities to enhance existing ones / or add more.

I recommend using a community-driven development approach when building the platform.

The Local Food Project

Our team’s Proposal for BSIC - Decentralized Impact Incubator. The original use-case is for India. I hope that the team can evolve it to be used in more countries / regions / use-cases.

See localfoodproject.md