David Behrends, Founder & President at Farmer Connect and Managing Partner and Head of Trade at the coffee trading company named Sucafina, joins us along with Diana Kaliff, Business Development Manager at Farmer Connect to discuss coffee on the blockchain. In this podcast we get to learn about how Farmer Connect is helping to not only to digitise their industry but also in bringing transparency and traceability to all players within the coffee supply chain industry from farmers to the end consumer.

 

What is blockchain?

Diana describes blockchain in how they use the technology at Farmer Connect. For them blockchain is a secure database that enables to both securely store and share data between different business partners.

 

For Dave, blockchain is like the arteries in our bodies:

* Arteries have thick, strong walls, that make them resistant to high pressure that exists near the heart. This is similar to blockchain’s cryptographic level of security.

* Each major organ in the human body has their own special kind of artery that delivers the needed supplies. This is similar to blockchain in the sense that you have public blockchain, private blockchains, permissioned blockchains each one of them with their own specific use case.

* Arteries take oxygen away from the heart and distribute it very efficiently to all the body's tissues. This is similar to a blockchain that has lots of complex data, standardising it and allowing it to seamlessly flow from one participant to another.

 

Challenges of the coffee industry and its level of digitisation

The coffee industry is characterised by a large amount of smallholder farmers who are facing a lot of issues around traceability and sustainability.

Consumers on the other hand, especially with millennials and post millennials really want to know two things:

* Has the coffee been responsibly sourced and has the farmer been paid a fair price

* Are the farmers themselves sustainable? Do they take care of social and environmental issues on the farm?

Being able to track both of these points is very difficult and to some degree impossible in the past. However, with the arrival of new technologies such as satellite imagery which can be used to measure deforestation. Soil samples analysis allows farmers to understand how much fertiliser is the right amount to be used for their farm. This kind of precision agriculture allows farmers to use less fertiliser and lower their environmental footprint. Both of these examples produce a lot of data.

In addition you have companies like Starbucks who have announced their intention to go resource positive - storing more carbon than it emits, eliminating waste and providing more clean freshwater than it uses.

All of the forementioned bring up lots of challenges and opportunities around how data is captured? How is it integrated? How is it stored? How is standardised? However, Dave believes that the biggest challenge is concerning the ownership of data. In the past many of the small farmers had zero technological capacity. In the past firms would send an agronomist to the field, they would “harvest” data of the farm, enter it into a table, hop back into a jeep back to the office and upload it into the company’s database to share the data with...