CALF_News_Feb_March_2019

21 CALF News • February | March 2019 • www.calfnews.net We buy DNA verified calves. It all began when a French cattleman bought a farm in Georgia... ® For more information visit: FPLFOOD.COM FPL Food is the Southeast’s one-of-a-kind source for sustainable beef. Privately owned and operated, this producer and processor pairs French provincial farming traditions with a dedication to providing quality beef. Expanding our Akaushi Beef Program We buy DNA verified calves Call us today! 706.922.5528 Raised without any growth implants, ionophores or promotants Weaned and backgrounded for at least 45 days. We buy feeder calves as well as finished fed cattle have to deal with it at some point. IBM Food Trust uses blockchain to network food growers, processors, distributors and retailers. It provides transparency, traceability and instant tracking of food products for food safety, food fresh- ness, food waste, food fraud, supply chain efficiency, brand trust, regulatory compliance, and to prove sustainable sourcing. Walmart has adopted it and is pressuring its food suppliers to use the product. Other major corporations using IBM Food Trust include Dole, Driscolls, Golden State Foods, Kroger, McCor- mick and Company, McLane Company, Nestlé, Tyson Foods and Unilever. That blockchain will impact the beef cattle industry at all levels is now inevitable. As a management tool, blockchain offers many benefits. By studying the data blockchain. This captures the free-range, grass-fed premium lost in the traditional marketing chain. The second part of the solution called for the establishment of an end-to-end supply chain design that uses BeefChain’s partnerships with whole- sale buyers, auction houses, feedlots and processors. By using BeefChain, ranchers get exclusive, long-term relationships with buyers around the globe. While blockchain holds promise of producing higher prices for cattle raisers, it will also benefit wholesale distributors, retail grocers, the food service industry and, ultimately, the consumer. Still, the first-ever blockchain beef herd consists of only 1,600 head that will be ready for delivery in the late summer of 2019. No one knows at this point if the consumer will pay more money per pound for this information. Regardless of one pilot project of a new company, blockchain is here to stay in the food industry, and you will BLOCKCHAIN CATTLE Continued from page 19 it provides, all players can discover where their inefficiencies, waste and fraud reside in their operations. It makes regulatory compliance easier and provides evidence to back your claims. Activists like to accuse and ambush the industry at all levels with accusations often difficult to refute. Blockchain makes disproving them easy and transparent. For those with good industry prac- tices, blockchain holds great promise, and its marketing enhancements should produce better profits because the QR code tag marketing model is clearly supe- rior to the current beef packaging model. However, producers who use marginal practices will find hiding in the crowd will soon become impossible thanks to blockchain.  Blockchain creates a distributed ledger that records transactions, when they occurred, verifies their authenticity, and then uses encryption to make them unchangeable and encrypted hashes to string them together in sequence.