Background - the feeding hands that keep us all alive are ignored and
abused around the world in various ways. A lot of the famers are stuck
in debt traps for a few reasons: non-availability of reasonable,
timely credit; lack of differentiation in pricing of their products;
unavailability of proper insurance; poor compliance to standards of
agriculture practices; degradation of soils year in and year out and
others.

Carbon Mint addresses some of these problems by on-farm traceability
of practices, inputs & quality using geo-stamped, timestamped and
user-stamped data on the blockchain. The data acts as evidence for
compliance and makes certification processes much more robust and can
significantly reduce fraud in organic & natural food production.

In this hackathon, we focused on a model of farming known as
"demand-driven" farming where a buyer commits to buying product at a
certain price range. We implemented a set of smart contracts to
connect wholesalers, farmer groups and farmers in a way that farmers
get early prepayments for seeds, inputs, tools etc. Buyers get
transparency, accountability and overall better quality products.

We believe that implementation of smart contracts to accompany
physical contracts have several benefits:

• evolution of new approaches to funding farmer investments, such as
  evidence-based pre-payments (and perhaps in the middle of the crop
  cycle as well) to reduce the captial outlay for the farmer, and
  reduce their dependence on high-interest loans
• coupled with traceability solutions, the transparency and
  availability of indisputable data gives higher degree of confidence
  about the quality of the harvest, demanding premium to the ultimate
  product.
• Representing the contracts as NFTs allows trading of the contracts
• Insurance companies are more comfortable to underwrite on the
  strength of foolproof contracts + data
• data tracking also makes it possible to measure the value of the
  agri systems via tokenization