GrainsWest Summer 2018

The Food Issue 2018 Grains West 42 Made , adding that the food realm is long overdue for a disruption. “The agricultural commodity shipping supply chain is one system that’s still reliant on paperwork,” she said. “That’s inefficient. This is a very ripe target for change and efficiency.” For Kub, the reduction in paperwork and the presumed reduction in human error due to blockchain’s unchanging nature has her excited for the future. “It’s a shared ledger, it’s not susceptible to tampering. The speed of it is where these grain companies are seeing this as an advantage,” she said. Louis Dreyfus’s maiden blockchain voyage cut document-processing time fivefold, and the company was able to monitor the operation’s progress in real time. Kub isn’t surprised to hear of these positive results because, unlike Bitcoin’s lengthy verification period, the commodity world operates in a “seconds” timeframe. “It’s worth spending the money because of the speed and reliability of it,” she said. HARDWARE David Yee is the VP of Saskatchewan operations at the Prairie Agricultural Machinery Institute, based in Humboldt, SK. The growing digitization of agribusiness clued him into blockchain. “There’s something interesting happening in farming. Many of the stages of output or activity, those things can be converted into a digital packet,” said Yee. Information within the supply chain could be placed into these digital packets, making it all instantly accessible. To that end, Yee’s group has been helping people conceptualize how the farm-to-fork movement may go digital, particularly on the hardware side via sensors. The group is promoting the possibilities of this technological innovation to agricultural commissions and informing farmers about it while generating their interest. These palm-sized sensors would be the conduits to track commodities from A to Z. For instance, a farmer loads a crop from his or her grain truck into the bin, where a sensor is dropped in. Then, it is transported to a country elevator, and the sensor stays with the grain as it’s deposited. As the grain is then loaded into a CN or CP railcar, the sensor continues to go with the grain. The train then heads to the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority where it is loaded onto an ocean vessel—sensor included—before heading into international waters. All the while, each transaction is logged and verified through a blockchain. By the time the crop gets to China, all the digital paperwork is complete, all transactions are verified to be true, and it can be physically verified that the device remained with the load throughout its journey by truck, train and boat. “They sift out the sensor [in China], and they are happy,” said Yee. The technology will someday start at the farm level, according to Yee, affording Prairie farmers new-found control and instant information, such as enhanced tracking, traceability and verification, all for a fraction of what it costs now. This inherently transparent tracking tool has the capacity to make the transportation of food highly secure, giving farmers valuable oversight in marketing their crops and securing public trust in the agricultural sector and farmers themselves. “These particular sensors can help them with their conditioning and storage for drying,” he said. “As blockchain becomes prevalent—this virtual sort “ As blockchain becomes prevalent—this virtual sort of transactional paradigm— it will make it move faster. It will overcome borders and hopefully has the capability to overcome trade barriers. ” —David Yee FEATURE