The Helium Network is a blockchain-based technology used to provide internet connectivity to IoT (Internet of Things) devices. Helium's blockchain acts as an immutable digital ledger upon which to store data collected by or transmitted from IoT devices—things like sensors and trackers.
The usefulness of this kind of technology is huge for food and beverage businesses. Not only does blockchain carry the potential for an entirely transparent and traceable supply chain, but it can also help retailers to achieve their commitments to sustainability and better meet customers’ needs.
Here we'll look into how Helium blockchain technology might revolutionize agriculture and how tech-centric farming practices can bring positive change along the entire food supply chain.
How farmers use blockchain for agriculture
Blockchain technology is offering all-new ways of monitoring agricultural activity — helping build trust between retailers and their raw ingredient suppliers and helping retailers prove a product’s provenance and authenticity when it comes to organic and ‘good for you’ labels.
Here are three fantastic use cases for this emerging technology.
Agricultural insurance
The climate is changing, and agricultural businesses need to respond as best they can. Increasingly frequent extreme weather conditions affect crops and livestock quality. Faced with such uncertainty, one way for farmers to protect their livelihoods is through insurance.
Insurance policies available to farmers differ depending on how losses are computed and payouts are carried out. Indemnity-based insurance is a type of agricultural insurance that compensates farmers depending on the assessment delivered by an expert who visits the farmland to inspect the damages.
However, indemnity-based insurance has a lot of disadvantages when it comes to damage examinations, a process that could stall payout for the claim and render the farm unable to resume operations.
Index-based insurance is a relatively new form of insurance that pays out based on specific conditions being met (like inches of rainfall measured over a given span of time). Helium-enabled sensors offer a way to track those conditions in real time and upload that data to the blockchain.
Blockchain for product traceability
As far as recordkeeping goes, blockchain provides a reliable and transparent history of transactions, making it ideal for tracing assets as they move down the supply chain.
For values-driven and ethical retailers, this could be a game-changer. After all, rather than just claiming your beef is grass-fed and that your wine comes from an organic, biodynamic vineyard… you can prove it instead.
Aside from building loyalty and supporting your brand message, blockchain traceability can add to your sustainability credentials as well. Using blockchain in this way can help tackle food waste in the supply chain ensuring food safety at all stages of production and post-harvest freshness.
Blockchain for smart farming and modeling
Smart farming involves the use of various technologies to bolster agricultural processes, efficiency, and dependability. Think precision irrigation, automated climate control for greenhouses, and sensors for soil health and moisture. The Internet of Things (IoT) plays a big role here, with IoT-powered beacons/sensors, data collection and analytical machines, and machine learning technology.
These technologies bring the agricultural industry into the modern era, optimizing operations and bolstering this critical, climate-sensitive sector against an uncertain future.
Read about how Buffalo Market is using blockchain in its business today.
When will the Helium blockchain be fully adopted?
It could be some time before we see a majority uptake of blockchain in agricultural businesses.
One of the main limitations of blockchain technology in agriculture comes down to the farm or site size. Small farms may struggle to collect and integrate farm data since they lack the infrastructure to support such a process — they may also see the innovations are too costly (both financially and in terms of time) to utilize the tech in its nascent state.
Some farmers may not be in a position, financially or psychologically, to make these kinds of big changes. All that said, we expect to see Helium and blockchain technology adopted more and more in the coming years.
How Buffalo Market uses Helium for food distribution
As a food distributor, Buffalo Market is keenly aware of the historical lack of transparency in the industry and how it leads to frustration and disappointment. That’s why one of the primary tenets of Buffalo Market’s business philosophy is to be as transparent as possible, both internally with our team members and externally with our retail and CPG partners.
To that end, our fleet of delivery trucks is outfitted with Helium-enabled sensors. These sensors allow us to collect and openly share data with our customers. If a store receives a delivery of frozen food, they can trust that our delivery driver kept the product at temperature the entire time it was in transit. How? Because they’re able to freely access the data collected from onboard temperature and humidity sensors on the blockchain.
Using Helium sensors and blockchain technology, Buffalo Market helps foster trust between ourselves and our clients and provides better service based on reliability and accountability.
To learn more about how Buffalo Market's tech-forward approach to food and beverage distribution makes us the fastest, most transparent, most brand-friendly company in the industry, reach out to one of our experts now.
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