Sharon Lyon

Project Manager, Trust Alliance New Zealand

Trust Alliance New Zealand (TANZ) is a non-profit member-driven

ecosystem, that understands that trusted data sharing is vital to maintaining and growing New

Zealand’s primary sector. They are establishing digital infrastructure that allows

farmers, growers, and other parties in the value chain (such as food producers,

processors, retailers and exporters) to easily capture and share data across the

sector while keeping it secure, protected and controllable.

 

Their core purpose is to address industry challenges through a collaborative ecosystem approach. Using a decentralised

solution for identity and data management which will ensure data privacy, data

security and the data ownership & permissioning rights of farmers & growers.

 
Supernova Award Category: 
Digital Safety, Governance, Privacy, and Cybersecurity
The Problem: 

Farmers in New Zealand need to share important data with a variety of parties, including green house gas emissions, livestock conditions, and more. Sharing this data relied on large third party databases, and the farmers lacked control over their data, allowing it to be shared without their consent and potentially cost them business opportunities.

The Solution: 

The problem was lack of control for farmers, leading to The Digital Farm Wallet, a joint pilot project between Trust Alliance New Zealand (TANZ), a nonprofit membership organisation with the mission of creating a verifiable data sharing ecosystem for New Zealand producers, growers, exporters, retailers & consumers, and New Zealand’s Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) to provide farmers with a digital wallet for securely holding and sharing critical data for their farms, such as their farm ID, greenhouse gas emissions, and farm boundaries. Launched in January of 2023, the pilot project is built on decentralized identity technology to provide better data control for farmers and allow them to more efficiently share their data when and how they want to.

The Results: 

Before farmers were reliant on third parties to store and share their data for them in large databases since that was what was available and widely used by the parties that needed to see the information.

After the project an entire new ecosystem had been developed that gave more control over their data to the farmer, and had buy-in from important players in the industry, including banks, regional councils, meat packagers, and more. This new ecosystem provides not only control, but opportunities to enhance the value of their products, for example, now instead of promises of organic produce they can offer digital proof.

Metrics: 

The relevant KPIs of this project are the number of participants in the pilot project and how many credentials were able to be issued and shared quickly and securely.

Our focus group of 200+ rural professionals (farm advisors, buyers etc) and farmers resulted in 212 unique wallet downloads with 104 on apple and 108 on android, working well on both platforms. Each wallet had four to six credentials farmers could create and use, including farm ID, greenhouse gas emissions, nitrogen emissions, and geospatial farm boundaries, which could then be submitted to their regional council.

The pilot successfully introduced farmers to digital wallets and verifiable credentials, and there was significant positive feedback about being able to download the farm wallet, get credentials for their farm, hold them in their wallet, and use them to share data. The ability to hold and control data rather than have it reside and be managed in a third-party database was warmly welcomed by farmers.

The Technology: 

The Digital Farm Wallet makes use of several open-source decentralized identity technologies including DIDComm v. 1, Hyperledger Aries, Hyperledger Anoncreds, Indy Node, ACA-Py and more. By building on verifiable credentials we hoped to lower the barrier to entry by reducing the amount of integrations necessary, and a lower barrier to entry will lead to more users and value for both farmers and the parties reliant on their data.

 
Disruptive Factor: 

We set out to build a digital wallet to cater to the farmers, and ended up creating a verifiable credential ecosystem focused on the relying parties. We realized that the value to farmers in the project comes from the parties that need the data, not so much just the farmers having more control and being able to store it better. 

Once the credentials were available, relying parties quickly emerged, such as banks and Silver Fern Farms, a meat packager that relies on a variety of farmers for supplying premium meats. Being able to quickly share data about their goods or emissions to these key relying parties provided a huge benefit to the farmers, saving them time, creating better connections between them and their customers, and reducing the amount of effort they have to spend filling out the same forms multiple times, and so by building an entire decentralized ecosystem, we changed the way significant players in the agriculture industry share and use their data.

Shining Moment: 

The ability to give farmers a voice to consent to their data being shared is huge, and since the beginning of the project TANZ has become known as the “decentralized people” because of this approach. Before, third parties had control over the data that farmers needed to work and operate their businesses. Farmers don’t want to be financially impacted because a third party shares their data without their knowledge.

About Trust Alliance New Zealand

The Trust Alliance New Zealand Incorporated (TANZ) is a non-profit industry consortium governed and operated by its members. We provide tools and protocols to enable a trusted data network. We believe in a decentralised approach, to enable easy data capture, and protection & permissioned sharing across the primary sector.