Why are you participating for Based Africa?

We are participating in Based Africa to create sustainable and innovative solutions that empower African communities, especially in the agricultural sector. Our project aligns with our motivation to contribute to solving the land ownership and farm investment challenges faced in many parts of the region. By leveraging blockchain technology, we can revolutionize how farmers manage land, gain investments, and improve overall productivity. This project is deeply connected to Africa's agricultural potential, and we are driven by a desire to unlock opportunities that lead to economic growth for smallholder farmers.

What challenges are you focusing on?

In many African communities, land ownership is often complicated by lack of transparency, inadequate documentation, and legal ambiguities. Additionally, access to capital for smallholder farmers is a persistent challenge, as traditional financial institutions often view agriculture as a high-risk sector. This leads to limited investment in agriculture and restricts the potential for large-scale food production. With climate change and soil degradation posing serious threats, the need for better land and crop management systems has never been more urgent. This makes farming not lucarative to the youth, because of this many youth focus on white color jobs leaving the farming sector with few labour where most of them are old and can not produce much.

How does your submission address this challenge?

Our solution leverages blockchain-based land tokenization to simplify and secure land ownership while enabling fractionalized farm investments. By representing land as ERC-721 tokens (NFTs), we establish an immutable and transparent system that ensures clarity in ownership. Additionally, we fractionalize farm yields through ERC-1155 tokens, allowing investors to buy stakes in specific agricultural ventures(yields), providing farmers with improved access to capital and encouraging more financial participation in agriculture.

To enhance the ecosystem, we integrated Chainlink oracles to automate key functions such as real-time asset valuations, loan eligibility checks, and liquidation processes. Through Chainlink automation, we schedule regular updates to fetch daily weather, soil, and land data from external APIs, which is securely stored on IPFS to ensure immutability and accessibility. This data-driven approach enables informed farming decisions, supports precision agriculture, and optimizes land management.

We also implemented farm mapping and crop monitoring tools that allow farmers to register and monitor their lands digitally. This system tracks crop performance across seasons and enables better resource allocation. With these features, the platform promotes sustainable agriculture by helping farmers identify optimal planting times and mitigate risks like adverse weather conditions.

Beyond land management, the platform makes farming attractive to younger generations by offering new opportunities for investment, transparency, and financial returns. By improving access to finance and creating a viable business environment, Yield aims to reduce unemployment, increase agricultural productivity, and contribute to lowering the cost of living.

Challenges we ran into

One significant technical challenge was managing the complexity of data storage for multiple land plots and ensuring scalability. The need to store daily weather and soil data for multiple lands on IPFS posed concerns around storage costs and speed. We overcame this by implementing Chainlink automation, allowing us to fetch soil and weather conditions efficiently. Another challenge was fractionalizing the ownership of farms, which we addressed by integrating ERC-1155 tokens that represent each farm's investment. The legal and regulatory complexities of tokenizing land ownership were also non-technical hurdles, but we are currently engaging with local regulatory bodies to ensure compliance.

Integrating real-time asset valuations using Chainlink oracles was complex, especially ensuring accurate and consistent updates across various assets. Designing smart contracts to handle multi-asset support (ERC-721 and ERC-1155) introduced complexities in managing collateral types and liquidation triggers. Ensuring seamless communication between the blockchain and off-chain data sources, such as weather and soil APIs, required careful orchestration, particularly for automating daily updates and maintaining data integrity on IPFS.

Additionally, we faced problems getting access to coinbase commerce and verification sdk which we intended to use to list farm yields with history of when it was grown to time of purchase. Using the verification sdk to check the location of the user before tokenizing land on our platform.