We all need to eat. The booming population of the earth has many hungry mouths to feed. Thankfully, modern industrial farming has become exceptionally effective at producing the food we need to survive - but it has not become efficient. 

It is estimated that between 25%-30% of global emissions come from our food systems, and an astonishing 70% of global freshwater is used for farming. Agricultural systems around the world that till the soil are a giant contributor to climate change. 

Yet, unlike many of our carbon producing and water-guzzling activities, food is essential. We can’t stop farming, we just need to make it better. And not just because of existential threats to our species, but also for our quality of life. More resilient, price-stable, cybersecure, and energy efficient farming practices will have knock on effects for our whole society. It’ll make farming more efficient, more profitable, and able to deliver food from farm to table at lower and more sustainable price points - as well as protecting the earth from the colossal waste inherent in traditional farming methods.

The Rise of Smart Farming

AgriTech is a sector that has introduced cybernetic systems into the entire farming ecosystem in a bid to produce a truly sustainable future where we all get to eat without destroying the planet. Modern farming is no longer a man with a mule and a cart, but a giant computerized ecosystem replete with soil nutrient sensors, pest detection units, GPS collars, smart feeders, predator alert devices, flood sensors, plant health monitors and much, much more. Modern farms aren’t just rolling fields that stretch to the horizon, but giant skyscrapers where each floor works synergistically to create artificial micro-climates to produce crops using drop irrigation, aero and hydroponics. 

Modern smart farming is thus increasingly reliant on huge fleets of edge devices that work in tandem to help produce better yields, reduce carbon emissions, maintain consistent performance and create adaptive techniques to respond to problems that farmers face. Be it changeable weather, marauding predators, or pestilent outbreaks that damage entire crops. Through effective use of smart devices, farmers can drastically reduce their environmental waste and improve the quality and sustainability of the food they produce. All these devices produce data that needs to be acted upon in real-time - and thus how that data is managed throughout the fleet is of critical importance. 

Why Edge Compute Is Essential for Better Farming

This is where Source Network’s distributed data management stack can help radically improve agricultural outcomes by not only improving the efficacy of these device fleets, but also reduce the carbon emissions produced by integrating computers within farming agriculture.

There’s no point reducing emissions through smart devices if those emissions are then added to by the belchings of power-hungry cloud-server farms - simply moving electrons from local devices to the cloud and back incurs significant wastage. There’s no point improving farm efficiency while exposing it to the catastrophic effects of outages in that tech infrastructure - especially with farming often taking place in rural or remote areas where connectivity to the cloud can be spotty and downtime more probable and more perilous.

Moreover, by introducing local-first paradigms, these networks of smart farming devices can operate at low latency, with faster response times and less infrastructure costs - and maintain resilience and constant performance in the face of server downtime. It makes these networks more scalable, with the opportunity to add more and more smart devices for better performance without increasing the overhead of having these devices overload a central cloud server.

How Source Network Helps Feed the World

Through Source Network, soil sensors can share nutrient data directly with irrigation systems that automatically dispense water in response. Livestock tracking collars sync locally with the feeding stations. When the cows move to one side of the farm, for example, stations could activate in response with the data emitted by the collars without needing to send the message to a cloud server and back again. 

The milk must flow and cows don’t starve because a server in a different country went down to a cyberattack. Plant health monitors that adjust microclimate humidity, temperature and CO2 levels can operate independently of the cloud so that crops don’t wilt due to connectivity issues. The principles of local-first software are as important on the farmstead as they are on the factory floor. Through edge computation, precision agriculture can vastly increase yields and drastically reduce both fiscal and carbon overhead of our farming activities.

DefraDB can manage all these different types of data across ever-scaling device fleets, allowing them to process essential data points on-device and propagate it to other devices and update them with the core information they need to enact their utility. Meanwhile, LensVM can transform data from these different smart devices (most likely provided by different manufacturers) and ensure it is homogenous and interoperable across the entire farm without having to build custom data transformations or resort to centralizing that data on a particular server before it can be acted upon. This rapid syncing of data means better outcomes through faster real-time latency and local updates among the devices themselves, with applications buildable that can synthesise this data to meet the bespoke needs of farming practices. 

The Importance of Resilience in Farming

Nowhere are resilient systems and traceability more important than the food we eat, and Source Network’s tools help farmers and AgriTech developers meet that aim. Our trust protocol, SourceHub, can create unimpeachable trust auditing for activities undertaken on the farm. By being able to track the data, audit how it's used, and have a clear accountability record of what data was sent, how it was processed, and what actions were taken by the device in response - immutable clarity about the activities farms undertake is assured. It also means that in the case of disaster - say a catastrophic weather event - farms can get up and running again faster because the data auditing trail up to that weather event is clear.

What’s more, without having that data sent to a cloud server out of their control, they can enshrine security by having each device only have access to the data it needs to perform its function. This is only partially related to economic competition, rather threats to agricultural systems are threats to entire countries. As smart farming continues to become more widespread, a cyberattack targeted at AgriTech is a direct attack on our food infrastructure. By adopting Source Networks’s distributed data stack, that threat surface becomes impregnable, with the Orbis Secrets Management Engine meaning there is no one attack vector that can bring the farm to its knees. 

Bringing Home the Bacon

AgriTech is an essential sector if we are to meet the food security needs for our global population. Yet adopting AgriTech through the traditional cloud-service model creates ever mounting expense, unreliability, lower performance and carbon-costly practices that can be mitigated through a local-first approach. Source Network’s distributed data management stack is the solution to these challenges, letting farmers and developments create cohesive locally syncing smart ecosystems that reliably, cheaply, and performantly bring food from farm to table at a fraction of climate and economic cost than we currently do. 

Our tech stack isn’t just about feeding the bottom line, but feeding the world too.