Image: Kira Hoffmann
In Australia there are 85,681 farm businesses. According to the National Farmers Federation, the complete agricultural supply chain, including the affiliated food and fibre industries, provide over 1.6 million jobs[1] to the Australian economy. Agriculture, however, is one of the least digitised sectors in Australia.
In 2015, Australian startup AgriDigital was formed to fix the inherent problems the agriculture sector was facing, and targeted the economic supply chain with one specific piece of technology: blockchain.
AgriDigital kicked off a pilot in the Australian grains industry to prove the potential of distributed ledger technology (DLT). Using JP Morgan's Quorum protocol -- an enterprise-focused version of Ethereum -- AgriDigital partnered with CBH Group, a grain growers' cooperative that handles, markets, and processes grain from the Wheatbelt region of Western Australia to prove the technology had a place in the supply chain.
Speaking with ZDNet about the pilot, AgriDigital strategic projects and engagement manager Bridie Ohlsson explained that CBH Group was specifically interested in investigating how blockchain could form part of a digital solution, improving operations and supporting farmers and supply chains in a number of ways.
"We were looking at how we could take a batch of organic oats from on-farm, all the way through to the retail consumer and capture that data and store it using blockchain technology in a way that was immutable and completely verifiable and transparent to participants where it needed to be," she explained.
This way, once the product reached the end consumer, they could look at the digital asset and see the entire provenance, production, and processing information.
AgriDigital's founders are farmers with 80 years' experience working across the farming sector between them. The startup now feels it's well-positioned to take advantage of new