Blockchain For Food: Making Sense of Technology and the Impact on Biofortified Seeds

The global food system is under pressure and is in the early stages of a major transition towards more transparency, circularity, and personalisation. In the coming decades, there is an increasing need for more food production with fewer resources. Thus, increasing crop yields and nutritional value per crop is arguably an important factor in this global food transition. Biofortification can play an important role in feeding the world. Biofortified seeds create produce with increased nutritional values, mainly minerals and vitamins, while using the same or less resources as non-biofortified variants. However, a farmer cannot distinguish a biofortified seed from a regular seed. Due to the invisible nature of the enhanced seeds, counterfeit products are common, limiting wide-scale adoption of biofortified crops. Fraudulent seeds pose a major obstacle in the adoption of biofortified crops. A system that could guarantee the origin of the biofortified seeds is therefore required to ensure widespread adoption. This trust-ensuring immutable proof for the biofortified seeds, can be provided via blockchain technology

Appropriate technology for sustainable food security:

CONTENTS: Brief 1. Overview / Per Pinstrup-Andersen Brief 2. Farmer-Based Agro-Ecological Technology / Jules Pretty Brief 3. Conventional Research-Based Technology / Prabhu Pingali Brief 4. Modern Biotechnology / Calestous Juma Brief 5. Modern Technology for African Agriculture / Jennifer Thomson Brief 6. Information and Communcations Technologies / Nuimuddin Chowdhury Brief 7. GIS, GPS, and Remote Sensing / Uwe Deichmann and Stanley Wood Brief 8. Alternative Energy Sources / R. K. Pachauri and Pooja Mehrotra Brief 9. Food Irradiation / Morton SatinTechnology., Technological innovations., Food security., Sustainability.,

Impacts of CIMMYT's International Training Linked to Long-Term Trials in Conservation Agriculture: 1996-2006

Education, Training courses, International cooperation, Research institutions, Natural resources, Resource conservation, Environmental Economics and Policy,

DARCOF II. Danish research in Organic Food and Farming systems 2000-2005

The aim of this book is to present a comprehensive overview of the 41 research projects undertaken in the period 2000-2005 in the research programme DARCOF II.For each project there is a description of its background and objective in terms of which issues gave rise to the project and what the project aims to achieve. This is followed by a short description of the experiments or investigations that have been undertaken in the project. The general and applicable results derived from the project are finally described. For each project there is a reference to a project home page on www.darcof.dk. Via this page there is direct access to "Organic Eprints", which is the site containing all the project publications – both technical and scientific

Elm Farm Research Centre Bulletin 82 February 2006

Regular newsletter with technical updates from the Organic Advisory Service Issue covers: organic sector payments, dietary health choices, avian influenza vaccination, tradable quotas, feeding cities, sewage sludge, organic aquaculture, organic poultry, biodiversity and productivity research, organic winter wheat varieties, linking farmers and scientists, Interreg Project, RAFAEL energy use greenhouse gas emissions food and farming

NETWORKING FOR SUCCESS: STRATEGIC ALLIANCES IN THE NEW AGRICULTURE

Agribusiness,

CropSight: A scalable and open-source information management system for distributed plant phenotyping and IoT-based crop management

Background: High-quality plant phenotyping and climate data lay the foundation of phenotypic analysis and genotype-environment interaction, providing important evidence not only for plant scientists to understand the dynamics between crop performance, genotypes, and environmental factors, but also for agronomists and farmers to closely monitor crops in fluctuating agricultural conditions. With the rise of Internet of Things technologies (IoT) in recent years, many IoT-based remote sensing devices have been applied to plant phenotyping and crop monitoring, which are generating terabytes of biological datasets every day. However, it is still technically challenging to calibrate, annotate, and aggregate the big data effectively, especially when they were produced in multiple locations, at different scales. Findings: CropSight is a PHP and SQL based server platform, which provides automated data collation, storage, and information management through distributed IoT sensors and phenotyping workstations. It provides a two-component solution to monitor biological experiments through networked sensing devices, with interfaces specifically designed for distributed plant phenotyping and centralised data management. Data transfer and annotation are accomplished automatically though an HTTP accessible RESTful API installed on both device-side and server-side of the CropSight system, which synchronise daily representative crop growth images for visual-based crop assessment and hourly microclimate readings for GxE studies. CropSight also supports the comparison of historical and ongoing crop performance whilst different experiments are being conducted. Conclusions: As a scalable and open-source information management system, CropSight can be used to maintain and collate important crop performance and microclimate datasets captured by IoT sensors and distributed phenotyping installations. It provides near real-time environmental and crop growth monitoring in addition to historical and current experiment comparison through an integrated cloud-ready server system. Accessible both locally in the field through smart devices and remotely in an office using a personal computer, CropSight has been applied to field experiments of bread wheat prebreeding since 2016 and speed breeding since 2017. We believe that the CropSight system could have a significant impact on scalable plant phenotyping and IoT-style crop management to enable smart agricultural practices in the near future

Beyond Markets and Hierarchies: Toward a New Synthesis of American Business History

We sketch a new synthesis of American business history to replace (and subsume) that put forward by Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., most famously in his book The Visible Hand (1977). We see the broader subject as the history of the institutions of coordination in the economy, with the management of information and the addressing of problems of informational asymmetries representing central problems for firm- and relationship design. Our analysis emphasizes the endogenous adoption of coordination mechanisms in the context of evolving but specific operating conditions and opportunities. This naturally gives rise both to change and to heterogeneity in the population of coordination mechanisms to be observed in use at any moment in time. In discussing the changes in the population of mechanisms over time, we seek to avoid the tendency, exemplified by Chandler's work but characteristic of the field, to see history of adoption in teleological rather than evolutionary perspective. We see a richer set of mechanisms in play than is conventional and a more complex historical process at work, in particular a process in which hierarchical institutions have both risen and, more recently, declined in significance.