Blockchain, Farm to Fork Traceability with ICBF and Oracle OpenWorld: 3 Months On

Three months ago I co-presented this deck at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco — which proved to be the last Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco for at least the next 3 years. The focus of our presentation was on a “Proof of Value” project that the Version 1 Innovation Labs had developed in collaboration with ICBF.

There have been numerous publications and blogs talking about this work, but I’ve not actually taken the time to sit down and offer my own views on it. So here we are, 3 months later, and I thought it’s about time I got my finger out for fear of our Marketing team revolting on me! By the way, a shout out to both the Version 1 Marketing team (and Joey Phan in particular) who do an amazing job helping us to promote our brand, and to Erin Kennedy from the ICBF who was instrumental in pulling together the presentation and the overall messaging of this story.

How did this all come about?

Version 1 has been an IT delivery partner for ICBF for over 15 years now and we have an incredibly strong relationship based on mutual trust and respect, and shared blood, sweat, and tears. When we set up the Innovation Labs, we thought about our customers, and who might be a good partner for exploring disruptive tech. ICBF immediately sprang to mind.

Wait, aren’t the ICBF farmers?

Absolutely not. The ICBF is an amazing industry-funded, not-for-profit Agtech company whose goal is to promote and improve the Irish cattle industry using technology. And these guys are serious techies with access to serious technology, including an on-premise Oracle Exadata! Take that.

They have a team of “Qualitative Geneticists” (with a similar skillset to Data Scientists but with very deep knowledge of the Agriculture and animal genetics domain) who analyse the DNA of Irish cattle to understand which traits result in cattle which are a) tastier b) greener (less emissions) c) quicker to gain weight and d) requiring less feed. On one database table alone, they have over 90 billion rows which they use for data analysis!! Who would have thought it? Additionally, the ICBF enables access to this incredible data source for the rest of the industry, acting like a “Data Science Platform” which can be utilised by members of the industry.

What is the mission of the ICBF?

The mission of ICBF is ultimately to improve the Irish Cattle Industry, using technology to examine and improve the genetics of Irish cattle, examining objectives such as:

• How do we breed more GHG efficient cattle? (I.e. cattle that burp less methane)
• How do we breed for tastier steaks? (Honestly, they can actually tell this from the DNA! Incredible)
• How do we breed cattle who require less feed and meet weight targets at a faster, more efficient rate?

The ICBF, in collaboration with their industry partners, are having incredible success in their research and application of technology to meet these objectives.

So what has Blockchain got to do with this?

ICBF collates data from industry partners (see left) which they store in their Exadata instance for analysis, and although ICBF have this incredible trove of data which they make available back to the industry, the consumer does not have access to this data.

There is no end to end visibility of the supply chain — no “Farm to Fork” visibility which consumers can better inform consumers:

• Where did this meat come from? Is it really “local”?!
• How tasty will this meat be?
• How green is this meat?
• Show me the provenance of this meat? Is it really cattle meat? (Think of the horsemeat scandal!)

The reason why ICBF does not make this data available to the consumer is that they do not currently capture the full end-to-end supply chain record, and when you understand that 90% of Irish beef is exported, then you understand that they could never expect foreign entities to send that data back to them.

Time for Blockchain to step into the frame. Blockchain is a perfect use case for a supply chain where multiple organisations need to share data amongst themselves in order to create the full end-to-end visibility, but where no one organisation is responsible for owning that data.

What exactly is Blockchain though?

I see a lot of hype about Blockchain which only serves to confuse customers, but let’s be clear — it’s a distributed database. And therefore it only applies in cases where you need a distributed database. Yes, Blockchain brings interesting traits to the party such as immutability, but you should always remember that it’s primary function is to act as a distributed database, whether that be the global and publicly available database known as Ethereum or Bitcoin, or private consortium databases shared amongst an approved group of organisations, typically running on something like the HyperLedger Fabric framework.

The Proof of Value

Once we had established that Blockchain was a technology which could enable that “Farm to Fork” traceability, we agreed to partner and collaborate on developing a “Proof of Value” on Blockchain.

For the purpose of speed and agility, we decided to use a “Blockchain as a Service” solution, and after analysing AWS, Azure and Oracle solutions — we found that Oracle offered a very good Hyperledger Fabric-based solution, with a nice UI that made creation of our network and management of our Smart Contracts very straight forward.

We developed the PoV over a period of 12 weeks and in that time developed a mobile app that consumers would use to query the network and the Blockchain network with a smart contract with integration points for all members of the supply chain network. We were able to model this based on existing ICBF APIs and therefore use real data to replicate a full transaction, whilst modelling the integration points for the additional parties outside of ICBF network.

The project was a great success and we were able to prove in that 12 week period that Blockchain is something that can add value, to ICBF, to the industry, and to the consumer.

Capturing the imagination

This PoV captured the international imagination as it showed how Irish beef continues to be a premium and innovative product, and demonstrated a real use case for Blockchain. As such, we were invited by Oracle to present on this solution at numerous conferences including the London Blockchain Summit and Oracle OpenWorld. Additionally, this featured in several leading publications including ITPro, Diginomica, and even Forbes. We also took part in a podcast recording for The Enterprise Times.

So what’s next?

I’m very excited at the possibilities this might create, and to be part of this story is an incredible honour for me. We will continue to work with ICBF to bring this solution forward and engage with the industry to make it real.

Summary

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed working on this project, and I want to call out Karl O’Connell from ICBF who I worked closely with throughout and who is also my fellow co-conspirator up on- stage! I have learned so much about their business, the incredible journey they’re on, and it’s been an absolute pleasure to learn about the exciting things they are doing for the Irish cattle industry.

Blockchain is hyped too much and is spoken about in abstract and technical ways which make it hard to understand why and when it is useful, and which unfortunately also leads too often to people dismissing it out of hand as yet another Blockchain hype project. However, this has been one of those stories which really does make sense for this technology, and which could truly have a huge impact for the industry and also the consumer.

Just imagine — you’re in the supermarket looking for that steak for tonights’ dinner. Which one will it be? Well wouldn’t it be great if you could make a much more informed and conscientious decision as to which is the right steak for you? One that is truly local, green and tasty?

Keep tuned for further updates on this story.