21st century Agri supply chain

[IMPACT]

General project Introduction

This proposal is part of a larger project run by Scott Poynton, the founder of The Pond Foundation, which is focusing on supporting food brands develop sustainable food supply chains focused on human and environmental impact. Scott Poynton is currently working on developing a new supply chain in Ghana, Africa. 

The following description starts with a general introduction to the overall challenge with food supply chains and the current focus of the The Pond Foundation project in Ghana and afterwards the opportunity and solution of the Catalyst proposal is described.

Overall challenge

“There are more than 608 million family farms around the world, occupying between 70 and 80 percent of the world's farmland and producing around 80 percent of the world's food in value terms. The new research teases out estimates of farm size: around 70 percent of all farms, operating on just 7 percent of all agricultural land, are less than one hectare.”

[Source: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations: https://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/1395127/icode/]

“The proliferation of global value chains has come with significant power asymmetries between global buyers and local farmers, thus restricting farmers’ ability to reliably access profitable markets, effectively bargain with their trading partners, and diversify and upgrade their income-earning activities”

[Source: Oxfam.org: https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10546/620596/dp-living-income-smallscale-farmers-151118-en.pdf]

Family farmers represent the basis of the world food system, and will be crucial to meet this demand. They also have a significant responsibility to ensure the quality of the food that we consume, as the frontline stewards of arable land. Yet, farmers possess a precious pool of knowledge, passed on from generation to generation, that can help agriculture adapt to changing climates or better coexist with fragile ecosystems. 

Scott Poynton - Proposal lead background information

Scott Poynton is a social entrepreneur who has spent more than 25 years at the frontier of major, difficult, and highly complex change processes that have helped individuals, organisations and entire industries to change and transform to a different, more regenerative way.

In 1999, he founded The Forest Trust (TFT, now Earthworm Foundation https://www.earthworm.org/) to anchor this work. When he stepped aside as CEO at the end of 2015, more than 260 TFT people were cooperating with businesses, communities, NGOs, experts and government officials in 48 countries, working to bring change in more than 20 commodity sectors, impacting the environmental and social responsibility of more than $1 trillion in annual supply chain transactions.

Scott brokered and wrote the world's first No Deforestation, No Exploitation and No Peatland clearance commitments for Nestlé, Golden Agri Resources, Asia Pulp & Paper and Wilmar International as part of mediation processes with Greenpeace, Climate Advisors and others. He pioneered the development of the High Carbon Stock Approach with Greenpeace and Golden Agri. He launched the first ever Pygmy language community radio station in the Congo Basin in collaboration with Congolaise Industrielle des Bois and founded the Centre for Social Excellence to support young Africans to develop the skills to help companies and communities find better paths forward.

Scott led projects that transformed the wooden garden furniture sector, that got the first natural forests FSC certified in the Congo Basin, Laos, and Peninsula Malaysia and the first community forests certified in Laos and Indonesia. He led the project that got more than 4,000 semi-automatic guns, used by forest guards, out of 2 million hectares of forest on the island of Java in Indonesia.

Scott is now leading projects, through The Pond Foundation's My Carbon Zero program, to support companies and individuals to take strong, credible climate action. Through the Foundation's Regen21 program, he is supporting projects to build 21st century regenerative supply chains. And through the Foundation's Share program, he is sharing lessons learned through all these past projects and growing TFT and now The Pond Foundation to scale, with other social entrepreneurs so that they can grow and build their own businesses to create impact, at scale, where they are. And finally, he is supporting the development of a program to inspire kids to learn about the UN Sustainable Development Goals and take their own climate action.

Scott is currently leading a Regen21 project to build a regenerative agricultural supply chain project in Ghana anchored in smallholder farms in the country’s Northern Region.

Ghana Project

In January 2022, WhatIF Foods (whatif-foods.com) became a member of The Pond Foundation. WhatIF Foods is seeking the Foundation’s support to develop and implement a new raw material supply chain within Ghana that supports their mission to source their raw materials from regenerative farming that materially improves the lives of farmers. Regenerative agriculture methods and mindset contributed to soil health, biodiversity, reducing erusions and capturing carbon from the atmosphere. It also includes reducing chemical fertiliser and considering farmer and consumers health. It is all part of the 21st century supply chain.    

Read more about WHatIF foods mission here: whatif-foods.com/pages/about

Before joining The Pond Foundation, WhatIF sourced 50 metric ton of the raw material Bambara Groundnut from Ghana. As part of the partnership with The Pond Foundation they are increasing their demand and by 2023, WhatIF needs 10,000MT of the raw material Bambara Groundnut from Ghana.

Ghana project Current status

In Dec 2021, WhatIF and The Pond Foundation undertook a preliminary visit to the Tamale region. The team visited seven communities to meet farmers and investigate the current supply chain. The visit identified clear opportunities to disrupt the current supply chain that would deliver greater financial benefits to supplying farmers and support implementation of regenerative practices. 

There are four key pillars in The Pond Foundations work to support building the new supply chain: Commercial; R&D, Outreach and Technology. Separate teams will assemble to deliver each pillar. 

The Commercial team will build the streamlined supply chain infrastructure, procure, and distribute seeds, support the farmers through the growing season and procure the resultant crop. The R&D team will bring agricultural system research to support yield increases, regenerative agriculture uptake, crop protection and storage. The Outreach team will support understanding of the current community socio-economic infrastructure, extension of R&D knowledge including on regenerative agriculture, and monitoring of ongoing socio-economic developments within the project partner villages. 

The Technology team will provide data gathering and analysis software and hardware to support ongoing monitoring and evaluation of the intervention’s impact and effectiveness. The Pond Foundation’s role is to coordinate the four teams into a coherent whole that delivers regenerative and farmer supported Bambara Groundnut raw materials

Update from a field visit, Scott Poyton, March 5, 2022:

“My week consisted of three field days which were long, dusty, hot but terrific. We visited 15 communities in all, meeting the Chiefs and then speaking with the communities. There were many questions about our ideas and intentions and much positive engagement. This was quite uplifting.

One thing that we're going to have in the coming weeks is a list of farmers who have registered their interest in joining the program. We don't know the final number yet, but my guess is that it will be close to 1,000. 

Altogether, we visited 25 communities and we've been asked for more forms in many of them so this is giving me a sense we're getting good interest.”

Collaboration with Catalyst Community

The above introduction is important to understand the challenge and opportunity. Anyone that is familiar with agricultural supply chains in developing countries will probably find the setting an exciting opportunity to build a model that works from the ground up. Working with The Pond Foundation to investigate the size of the opportunity to do Nation building Dapps and infrastructure is unique:

• A very experienced and renowned project owner
• Already “boots on the ground” in Ghana
• Connection to a corporate buyer
• A supportive catalyst team, including local WADA members

In this proposal we are aiming to use this unique collaborative opportunity to research and test how decentralised technology can support and accelerate prosperity within poor nations with less basic social support.

The proposed solution

This proposal is focused on working together with Scott Poynton, The Pond Foundation and the Ghana project through key activities, to do research, test potential solutions and deliver a proposal for an end-to-end solution to support and scale the new 21st century supply chain. The end-to-end solution will be based on the use case in Ghana, but should be available and applicable for other locations as well.

Key activities

The following are key activities for the team of this proposal to succeed:

• Analyse the farmer community situation - this phase is already in progress by Scott and a local team in Ghana and will continue until June
• Build trust with the farmers - this phase is already in progress by Scott and a local team in Ghana and will be ongoing work 
• Understand the role and incentives of the facilitators who support farmers - Scott already started this phase.
• Gather farmer information - this phase is just initiated by the “farmer form” to join the program (when we speak about the farmer information it will include: basic personal info, farm details, crops details, production details, input serviced needed, traders network)
• How to connect and align the ecosystem stakeholders; farmer, facilitator, aggregator, processor, brand and consumer around supporting a common mission.

The research

As within academia, research questions are the starting point for knowledge creation. As a foundation for the research the following research questions, to be answered, have been defined: How can decentralised technology… 

• ..accelerate farmers to organise around a shared goal?
• ..make farmer organisations’ work more efficient?
• ..help scale the number of engaged farmer communities?
• ..enable governance structures to increase empowerment through ownership?
• ..be used to build a framework for structured collaboration between farmer organisations and stakeholders with the ecosystem supply chain?
• ..be used to deploy and manage value i.e. capital, goods, documentation between ecosystem stakeholders to increase efficiency?
• ..incentivise the global supply chain and farmer expert community to support the ecosystem stakeholders with knowledge?
• ..facilitate raising price competitive funds for community startup costs?
• ..facilitate emotional connection between all ecosystem stakeholders to build an ecosystem supporting each other in a shared mission?

Potential solutions

Potential technology tools required to support the work on the ground. Some key technology models that will be evaluated includes:

• Atala Prism DID - already 1000 farmers showed interest to participate in the program and we can design the model for them
• Open ledger database - where farmer information is accessible for ecosystem players, based on permissions. This will probably be a central model based on which many other dApps could be developed. For example:
• Microfinance and micro insurance
• Food certifications 
• Supply chain traceability 
• Farmer financial management dApp
• Benchmark  
• Facilitator dApp to interact with the farmer, provide them value and gather information
• Farmer (or farmer group) financial infrastructure - wallets and ability to use funds within others players on the platform
• Farmer (or farmer group) economic ledger - farmer cash flow statement, revenue and expenses that will help to better manage funds as well share it
• Farmer practices model  
• Supply chain models

This proposal is targeting one of the biggest issues we have in the 21st century. 

“Agriculture in the 21st century faces multiple challenges: it has to produce more food and fibre to feed a growing population with a smaller rural labour force, more feedstocks for a potentially huge bioenergy market, contribute to overall development in the many agriculture-dependent developing countries, adopt more efficient and sustainable production methods and adapt to climate change.”

[Source: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations: www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/wsfs/docs/Issues_papers/HLEF2050_Global_Agriculture.pdf]

The proposed end-to-end solution will be the foundation which will enable the next phase of building the dapps as building blocks for the agricultural farmers within poor nations and thereby increase dapp usage on Cardano, to start with in Ghana, later in multiple other locations together with the WADA organisation and the international renowned The Pond Foundation.

Blockchain technology and Cardano could support transparency and traceability of information and build trust between ecosystem players. It will enable the project to create new models between farmers and brands & consumers, it will also help more efficiency of agriculture practices as well as better access for services such as micro insurance and micro finance

The potential of social and financial inclusion together with economic development is very high since it is the core premise of the whole proposal to solve and scale this.

For this proposal we do not see major challenges. One key potential challenge is to build an initial trust with farmers and connection to local community leaders and the communities themselves. This work has started and is ongoing with already positive indications with more than 1,000 farmers registering their interest in The Pond Foundation-WhatIF Foods project.

Additional challenges could be around adapting the solution to local culture but WADA will support in mitigating it with local teams on the ground. However, the challenge could be understood by team members not based in Ghana, this is why Magnus who is heading product will join Scott in one of his field trips.

[FEASIBILITY]

The goal is to get funding from the Catalyst community for the “Research and solution concept testing” phase. This will provide an important resource for Cardano to be able to provide solutions to this key sector for developing countries. We will then recommend the various dApps and tech solutions that need to be built with prioritisation..

The roadmap will include:

Phase 1 “Research and solution concept testing” [3 month]

Planned deliverables:

• Research findings
• Product strategy proposal
• Conceptual end-to-end design proposal
• Product roadmap, including detailed list of possible dApps and services by the Cardano ecosystem  
• Business proposal, considering also unique models related to blockchain such as tokenization and NFTs 
• Project management

The first month will be dedicated to collecting information from Scott and having an initial framework in place. A field visit will be planned for the second month and the months mainly dedicated for designing the solutions. 

This is the phase covered in this proposal 

Phase 2 “Dapp prototyping” [3 month]

Planned deliverables:

• Technical solution design
• UX & UI design mockups
• Web2 interfaces
• Dapp development commits
• DAO structure proposal
• Business and funding plan
• Ecosystem stakeholder tests

Phase 3 “Building MVP” [6 month]

Planned deliverables:

• Live MVP product
• Core product usage metrics
• MVP product description
• Planned product roadmap
• Product strategy for future development
• Investment pitch

The budget is for Phase 1 “Research and solution concept testing” and for a period of 3 months. The budget is divided into main tasks based on the deliverables of the proposal

Research [USD 9000] - numerous interviews with Scott, collecting research materials, field visits. USD 3000 pr. month for 3 months

Travel [USD 2000] - field trip including flight and all other expenses 

Product strategy proposal [USD 1000]

Conceptual end-to-end design proposal [USD 3000]

Product roadmap [USD 1000]

Business proposal [USD 2000]

Local support by WADA team [USD 4500] including project manager, field trip and feedback to design papers. USD 1500 pr. month for 3 months

Total USD 22.500,00

Scott Poynton, Project Lead

Experience: 

Scott is a real social and environmental leader for the last 30 years. He created an NGO named The Forest Trust (currently www.earthworm.org) and his estimated positive impact is for about $ 2 trillion of supply chains and millions of hectares of forest. He is now on his biggest mission to mitigate climate change. 

#Scott is already involved with the Cardano community. He presented at the Catalyst sustainable goals event: Cardano & Climate Change:

(00:30:18 Corporation, Trust and Blockchain, Scott Poynton). He is also part of an important related fund 7 funded proposal, the Cardano Carbon Footprint: cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/385045 

Involvement: Leading the project within Ghana and enabling access to stakeholders of the supply chain.

Links: https://www.scottpoynton.com/about-1 

For more information please visit:

www.thepondfoundation.org

www.earthworm.org

https://adifferentway.life/

Magnus Edvard Nielsen, Product lead

Experience: 

Magnus is a product lead with 10+ years experience in building technology products, teams and companies in both B2B and B2C. He has a strong focus on lean methodologies; build, test and learn to stay close to customers, new market trends, increase product quality and speed of development. A Strong passion for web3, complex digital products, getting from “zero to one” and building a sustainable future for our planet.

In June 2019 travelled to Indonesia for research on Indonesian farmers within rice, coffee, coconut sugar.

From 2017-2021 Leading the innovation team, at one of the biggest PaaS companies within digital supply chains named Tradeshift. The innovation teams two focus areas was decentralised technology and environmental sustainability.

Involvement: Leading the product research and product development.

Links: www.linkedin.com/in/magnusedvard/

Yoram Ben Zvi, business models lead and connect to the Cardano ecosystem

Experience: 

20+ years of business experience working with technology companies (strategy, partnerships, investors). In the last years, Yoram is focused on combining impact and business. 4 years ago he left his comfort zone and worked for 2 years for an NGO Earthworm.org focusing on sustainable business models across agriculture supply chains.Yoram is very active in Catalyst as a CA, successful proposer, and at Cardano4Climate. Yoram is part of the AIM team and is involved with the Catalyst SDG tool cardanocataly.st/proposer-tool-sdg/#/ (which is included in the proposal process) and the catalyst alignment to SDG research. 

Yoram was working on a related project in Indonesia for one year with Earthworm.org together with Magnus and understand the opportunity and the importance of impacting the agri supply chains  

Involvement: Leading ecosystem and business model development.

Links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yoram-ben-zvi-446836/

WADA local support lead and feedback for localisation of technology

Description:

WADA gives voice and access to people of African heritage and interest by providing the tools to reimagine new socioeconomic models in a way that reflects local cultures, values and future aspirations. Although our focus is on Africa, WADA is an all inclusive organization structured to provide seekers with providers. This is done with a focus on decentralization, self-organisation and distributive governance.

Involvement:

WADA has team members based in Ghana and northern Ghana nearby the project. The WADA team will help to design the solution and validate the solution is suitable for the local market as well as with relevant connections. 

AIM

Description: 

Cardano AIM (Assembly Inspiring Masses) brings together active Catalyst Community members to design and build tools that support the community. Some examples: include the popular voter-tool (https://cardanocataly.st/voter-tool/#/), the Community Advisor Tools (CA and vCA-tools) (https://cardanocataly.st/ca-tool/#/ & https://cardanocataly.st/vca-tool/#) as well as the Community Landing Page (https://cardanocataly.st/). AIM continues to focus on developing the best services and tools for the benefit of the Cardano community.

Involvement:

AIM team will be involved in helping to analyse and suggest solutions for the product strategy proposal and end-to-end solution.

[AUDITABILITY]

For Phase 1 “Research and solution concept testing” progress can be tracked through the following:

• Google Drive with research findings from observations and interviews with relevant ecosystem stakeholder; famers, facilitators, The Pond Foundation, distributors, processors, brands and consumers.
• Monthly status document communicated.
• Post Townhall breakout rooms for discussing findings and ideas.
• WADA will be involved in this phase and will be able to provide transparency into the progress
• Deliverables includes the various reports which will be available for the community
• The results from the proposal will be communicated to the community also through a joined meetups by Cardano4Climate and WADA

Product metrics will in Phase 1 and 2 (before a live product) be will take into consideration the following metrics: 

• The amount of small holder farmers who express they are having a better life.
• The amount of small holder farmers increased their income by >X%.
• The amount of regenerative farming practices used per produced crop.
• The amount of CO2 reduced for each produced crop.
• The amount of chemicals (artificial fertiliser and pesticides) reduced.
• Having a economical feasible en-to-end supply chain for all stakeholders involved.
• Number of employees values/emotionally connected to their employer, the brand.
• Number of consumers connected to brand through the values they stand for.
• Increased interest from investors to invest in food brands wanting to build “the new supply chain”.
• Increased interest from brands wanting to source food crops through “the new supply chain”
• Decrease the time from brand and investor interest to fully functioning “new supply chain”

For Phase 1 “Research and solution concept testing” success will be an ecosystem stakeholder validated proposal, for an end-to-end solution, utilising decentralised technology to build and scale the new the 21st century agri supply chain, to support all stakeholders in achieving sustainable prosperity for farmers and positive impact on nature.

It is a new proposal

SDG Rating

There are many SDGs covered in this proposal as it touches the basic elements of many developing nations. Below are some key examples:

SDG goals:

Goal 1. End poverty in all its forms everywhere

Goal 2. End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture

Goal 5. Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls

Goal 8. Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all

Goal 13. Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts

Goal 15. Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss

SDG subgoals:

1.1 By 2030, eradicate extreme poverty for all people everywhere, currently measured as people living on less than $1.25 a day

1.4 By 2030, ensure that all men and women, in particular the poor and the vulnerable, have equal rights to economic resources, as well as access to basic services, ownership and control over land and other forms of property, inheritance, natural resources, appropriate new technology and financial services, including microfinance

1.a Ensure significant mobilization of resources from a variety of sources, including through enhanced development cooperation, in order to provide adequate and predictable means for developing countries, in particular least developed countries, to implement programmes and policies to end poverty in all its dimensions

15.3 By 2030, combat desertification, restore degraded land and soil, including land affected by desertification, drought and floods, and strive to achieve a land degradation-neutral world

15.a Mobilize and significantly increase financial resources from all sources to conserve and sustainably use biodiversity and ecosystems

2.a Increase investment, including through enhanced international cooperation, in rural infrastructure, agricultural research and extension services, technology development and plant and livestock gene banks in order to enhance agricultural productive capacity in developing countries, in particular least developed countries

5.5 Ensure women’s full and effective participation and equal opportunities for leadership at all levels of decision-making in political, economic and public life

#proposertoolsdg