Coffee and cacao farming are linked to deforestation around the globe, but many sustainable cultivation practices are being rewarded in the industry.
A new tech start-up aims to give farmers and consumers a more precise idea of how sustainable their agricultural practices are using a mobile app. Farm-Trace is a mobile app where you capture measurements of the landscape, and it manages and produces a sustainability report based on zero-deforestation goals, carbon storage, and canopy cover.
The company says its platform uses satellite data coupled with machine learning algorithms and is already being used in the coffee, cacao, animal agriculture, and timber sectors.
It was not immediately obvious how these elements worked with the app as a new website is under construction, but we’ve registered for their news and will post updates.
Hopefully, sustainability labels and certifications will be able to use this data to create more transparency for consumers. Imagine the impact it would have to be able to buy a bag of “sustainably produced coffee” and see the stats in, near real-time, about the source of your beans.
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hCoApnz3LY[/embedyt]Sixty-six per cent of consumers are willing to pay more for sustainable products, but most organizations don’t know the farmers they source from, let alone their impact – Kahil Baker, CEO tells Provenance News
As we know, shade-grown cacao and coffee have been proven to benefit the coffee and cacao plants, the soil, and the surrounding ecosystem. Canopy cover is an easy way to quantify this practice and coupled with soil metrics. It will be possible to truly differentiate between production systems that harm the environment and growers that work with the environment.
