Many farmers lack the digital infrastructure to support the integration of blockchain solutions, though the agricultural industry stands to reap enormous efficiency savings through the adoption of distributed ledger technologies
The challenges associated with fostering DLT adoption within primary industries, have been discussed by Bridie Ohlsson, at the Australian Blockchain Week on April 21
In the words of Bridie Ohlsson, he opined that:
“In ag tech, it’s been a problem of not having enough infrastructure, not there not being a use case,” she said. “As long as we have farmers calling up and saying, ‘Hey, your product looks great, but I don’t have internet on-farm’, that’s an infrastructure problem. And so we definitely need to be investing more in simply access to technologies.”
“In 2016, when we started piloting some of the applications of blockchain for [agriculture], we were moving people off pen and paper, and our biggest competitor was Excel.”
Ohlsson also argued that agriculture has failed to realize the promise of blockchain technology as a force for democratization so far, with the majority of DLT pilots being executed by large corporate entities:
“Blockchain has been a world of multimillion dollar pilots for vertically integrated companies. It hasn’t held true to its promise necessarily of democratizing access to technology, and it’s been too technical and too expensive for 570 million farmers globally to access.”
However, Ohlsson believes this is now changing, asserting the technology can now be offered at an affordable price, “rather than starting with a huge pilot agreement, a whole lot of legals, and hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank.”
“I think that it’s shifting, and I think that puts us in a good position now to capitalize on what we haven’t been able to deliver previously,” she added.