i4Trust Experiment: CADS – Carbon

Agri Data Space

The Challenge

One of the biggest challenges in agriculture today is the use of heterogeneous data for smart farming technologies, improving soil fertility, and food quality, and reducing the impact of agricultural technologies on climate change.

Today, numerous sources of data are collected and not leveraged as much as they could be. Potential applications are huge, such as decision-support tools taking into account not only scientific recommendations but also information about the experience of using various agricultural additives for specific climatic and environmental conditions. Carbon measurement and estimation are promising applications to improve the existing systems, but also to provide new value streams for farmers.

The Solution

The idea is a service for the assessment of the carbon footprint of agricultural products in the process of growing as well as tools for sound adjustment of agro-technological, organizational and management decisions by food producers. Thanks to a data-sharing ecosystem, we will provide the opportunity for farmers (through data service providers interacting with the decentralized data-sharing infrastructure powered by ØKP4 blockchain protocol), to leverage the use of the data they already produce, combined with other data sources such as external and open data. It will provide them with tools that will help the farmers to come up with tangible proof of their carbon impact. Also, dedicated stakeholders of the ecosystem will find go-to-market opportunities for these proofs, bringing back value for the whole ecosystem.

Business Projections – Scalability

Once the developments are done and the solution is ready, the governance body will focus on building a scalable business model across the consortium. Data sharing will demonstrate benefits for many participants – in optimizing existing products, valorizing bi-products, and making consortium partners more attractive to downstream users in selecting new primary producers for new product lines within the carbon-negative economy. Also, some outputs of the data space are valued by the market, and this value will be distributed among contributors, according to a fair business model defined by the governance. For example, the current price per tonne of CO2-e is €30-40 in the compliance market – analysts predict this to rise to €80 per tonne by 2030 as EU-wide sequestration targets drive large-scale investors to increase the volume of carbon-negative market products becoming available at scale (including on-farm soil carbon sequestration and long-cycle productization).

The original source: i4Trust.org