Smart Contract Farming

Background - the feeding hands that keep us all alive are ignored and abused around the world in various ways. A lot of the famers are stuck in debt traps for a few reasons: non-availability of reasonable, timely credit; lack of differentiation in pricing of their products; unavailability of proper insurance; poor compliance to standards of agriculture practices; degradation of soils year in and year out and others.

Carbon Mint addresses some of these problems by on-farm traceability of practices, inputs & quality using geo-stamped, timestamped and user-stamped data on the blockchain. The data acts as evidence for compliance and makes certification processes much more robust and can significantly reduce fraud in organic & natural food production.

In this hackathon, we focused on a model of farming known as "demand-driven" farming where a buyer commits to buying product at a certain price range. We implemented a set of smart contracts to connect wholesalers, farmer groups and farmers in a way that farmers get early prepayments for seeds, inputs, tools etc. Buyers get transparency, accountability and overall better quality products.

We believe that implementation of smart contracts to accompany physical contracts have several benefits:

• evolution of new approaches to funding farmer investments, such as evidence-based pre-payments (and perhaps in the middle of the crop cycle as well) to reduce the captial outlay for the farmer, and reduce their dependence on high-interest loans
• coupled with traceability solutions, the transparency and availability of indisputable data gives higher degree of confidence about the quality of the harvest, demanding premium to the ultimate product.
• Representing the contracts as NFTs allows trading of the contracts
• Insurance companies are more comfortable to underwrite on the strength of foolproof contracts + data
• data tracking also makes it possible to measure the value of the agri systems via tokenization

• Internet access!
• Our team is relatively new to web3 and smart contracts, which got us stuck in loops for a while
• We started off with much more ambitious goal of coordinating between layers of smart contracts but we had to trim down the scope in the end, given the time
• We couldn't complete push notifications even though we felt it an important feature