Trust Alliance New Zealand (TANZ) is a finalist in the SuperNova Awards for its transformative use of decentralized identity in agriculture. TANZ, co funded by the Ministry for Primary Industries New Zealand Government, created a pilot decentralized ecosystem for farmers to understand how to share trusted data on regulatory compliance around emissions and environmental sustainability — and its so successful, it’s being scaled to cover the entire agricultural sector.
Here’s why the project deserves your vote.
By James Schulte
The project
Farming is a data-intensive business from animal welfare and food safety to greenhouse gas emissions and soil health, all of which is tied to market access, regulatory compliance, and consumer confidence.
In line with the government of New Zealand’s introduction of a Digital Identity Services Trust Framework, Trust Alliance New Zealand (TANZ), a non-profit, member-driven, farming industry consortium, conceived and built a pilot digital farm wallet and decentralized ecosystem (with partners Indicio and Anonyme labs) for the country’s primary sector.
The Digital Farm Wallet pilot project was launched in January 2023 to provide farmers and other relevant parties with a secure, permissioned way to capture and share data while preserving privacy. The focus, initially, was on regulatory compliance and simplifying that burden.
But a key goal was to create the digital infrastructure to transform “brand” promises — origin, welfare, environmental compliance — into transparent proofs that consumers can trust, which is vital for New Zealand’s export market, and a transformative use decentralized identity technology for global agriculture.
The result
The initial project quickly expanded to go beyond TANZ members to include farming organizations, regulators, and banks and had over 200 active participants. Each wallet had four to six credentials farmers could create and use, including farm ID, greenhouse gas emissions, nitrogen emissions, and geospatial farm boundaries, which could then be submitted to relevant stakeholders, for example, regional councils, banks and/or processors.
The challenge was to bring so many competing stakeholders together to collaborate around and adopt a new and unfamiliar technology. This was overcome by education and, more importantly, by the nature of the technology itself and the benefits it quickly delivered.
Specifically, farmers were able to realize tangible savings in time and money by simplifying and streamlining compliance requirements. Paper documentation that often had to be submitted up to seven times was transformed into a simple verifiable credential presentation.
Second, the technology gave farmers control over this data and how they shared it. This gave them confidence that the technology wasn’t another app where their data was aggregated and managed by a third party. This was vital to fostering collaboration with competitors in the ecosystem.
“The project vastly exceeded expectations,” said Sharon Lyon, Project Manager at TANZ. “We set out to build a pilot digital wallet to cater to the farmers, and ended up creating a verifiable credential ecosystem focused on the relying parties. We realized that the value to farmers in the project comes from the parties that need the farm data, and the farmer being able to give the data in a trusted and permissioned way.
“Once the credentials were available, relying parties were onboarded into the pilot.. Being able to quickly share data about their goods or emissions to these key relying parties provided a huge benefit to the farmers, saving them time, creating better connections between them and their customers, and reducing the amount of effort they have to spend filling out the same forms multiple times. So building a decentralized ecosystem for the sharing of digital proof points, or credentials, and not just a digital wallet, soon became our focus.”
The Digital Farm Wallet is in the process of being scaled to the entire New Zealand agricultural sector and with expanded functionality.
If you would like to learn more about the project you can watch a recent discussion Indicio hosted on the Digital Farm Wallet here.
How to vote
Voting is live from August 5 to August 30 on the Constellation website and should take less than a minute. Please consider taking a moment to recognize all of the farmer’s lives that TANZ has improved, and the groundbreaking work put into this project.
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