The Our Roots White Paper: Urban Farming and Blockchain

Our Mission: To localize food systems in high-density urban communities.

Our Roots wants to localize food systems by providing turnkey farming solutions to local communities in any climate. Our digital community supported agriculture platform fosters consumers to have a deeper connection to their food supply, their health, and their local farmers.

Our Vision: A distributed network of local farms around the world.

There are many challenges in the current state of the local urban farming market. Supermarket chains in the US stock produce grown in distant corners of the world that have traveled thousands of miles before reaching the accessible shelves of disconnected privilege. This modern day mercantile marvel has become the everyday norm in many first world countries. Most consumers in this situation no longer have any idea where their food comes from; they don’t know how their food is grown, how it is transported, what chemicals are used in the process, and they certainly don’t know the farmers who grew it. This has created a gap in supply of nutritionally-dense and locally grown fruits and vegetables.

Our Roots aims to shift the local urban farming paradigm. We plan to grow nutritionally-dense produce as geographically close to consumers as possible providing communities with year-round access to locally grown greens. Some of the major benefits of our solution include:

• Unique digital CSA model
• Food source tracking to ensure that crops are in fact local and fresh
• Grown as geographically centered to users as possible
• Year round harvests

There are a few components which allow our model to function:

• Hydroponic shipping containers to grow our produce
• The native Ethereum based Our Roots token called RTS (RootShares) and its sustainable ecosystem
• Our network of partners and friends who support us

This document aims to provide a high-level overview of the types of users in our ecosystem and the general token model.

If you have any questions or would like to discuss our token model, please reach out to [email protected]. If you have any questions about our farms please reach out to [email protected].

Reimagined Urban Farm

Our Roots introduces a new paradigm for local communities to participate in the growth and operations of their produce. Keeping the economic cycles as local as possible provides the most benefit to the people directly involved.

Today economic cycles related to food are so robust and globalized that any of the excess capacity produced by the operations gets distributed to various middlemen-mainly shipping companies and large corporations. Any excess value produced does not get distributed to the people ultimately consuming the food.

We see an alternative to this model. By keeping the economic cycles contained through the use of crypto-currencies and digital tokens (which represent a future share of the produce grown for the life of the business), members of the community can actually participate in the economic model by doing what they were already doing: paying for the food.

This brings us to the RTS(RootShares) token. In essence, RooTShares are the agreement. It allows us to acquire shipping container farms and set up the infrastructure to power the operations. Owning RTS allows for a deeper connection between the farmer and the consumer - it allows consumers to participate in the growth of the food. RTS is also a mechanism to determine who owns how many shares of crops. If you hold enough digital tokens in your account, you get a share of crops every cycle of production. You can also trade those tokens and spend them like you would dollars.

The Our Roots ecosystem cycles as follows:

• Community members, both individuals, and restaurants acquire RTS for a future stake in all crops produced
• The CropBox is funded, deployed and put into operation
• The harvests occur and people with enough RTS in their account get a share of harvest
• The CSA members can either acquire their produce or notify the network to sell their share at the next market
• Earnings from the crops are distributed in cryptocurrency to the user’s account

This process creates a sustainable cycle where the value the operations of the farm is tied to the digital token, and supports the value of RTS. RTS itself will always have the same number of tokens to represent a percentage of the crop shares.

Digital Community Supported Agriculture

Community Supported Agriculture(CSA) first came about in the 70s when Rudolf Steiner proposed a new form of biodynamic farming. The CSA model was created as a means to bring the farmer and the consumer closer together, sharing both the risks and rewards of farming. It was a revolutionary step in farming that has allowed members of local communities to participate in their food consumption rather than just being another unconscious consumer in a non-sustainable cycle. Providing the opportunity to contribute to the growth of the crops directly cuts out unnecessary parties in the machine.

Utilizing Ethereum’s3 smart contracting capabilities, we have created the next step in the CSA model. Using a digital token to represent sharing agreements for the harvest, we not only have a revolutionary model for operating our farms, we are also able fund and validate the need for our farms before harvests through the pre-sale of our digital token.
Owning a certain number of our tokens is representative of participation in the network, and therefore represents a share of the harvest. The share is recurring and the participant earns a share of the crops produced in the farm every time there is a harvest. After approximately 3 years, the cost per harvest for the consumer goes to $0 because, as they make use of their crop-shares, they are essentially paying back their initial investment. This means that once the initial investment has been paid back the consumer continues to receive shares in the harvest for the remaining life of our operations without any additional payments.

A New Model For Transacting Value

Participation in the Our Roots ecosystem signifies a shift in comprehension related to value creation principles. Our tokenization model, which funds the farms, simultaneously develops trustlines for the future distribution of value through the ecosystem. As opposed to simply acquiring an end product, we encourage everyone to get involved throughout the creation process. Taking on risk and acquiring tokens up front leads to a reward in heavily discounted produce.

Another unique thread in our ecosystem is that it allows for shares of the harvest to be freely traded, just like dollars. The digital token representing a portion of a share has a verifiable inherent value based on its relational value to one RTS.

Let’s say that the lifetime value of one RTS is equivalent to $10 because of the portion of total harvests it represents over the lifetime of the CropBox. That value is then transactable through the RTS token on various exchanges.

Transparent Supply Chain

The RTS token operates in tandem with our transparent supply chain. Provenance in food sourcing until this point has been almost nil on the consumer end.

We reverse this paradigm by putting complete transparency and trackability from seed to consumer. With a simple QR scanner, consumers can ensure the legitimacy of the product and trace the product back to the source.

Case Study

Local Restaurant
A restaurant uses 10 pounds of basil per month. In the RTS model, 1 share is equivalent to one pound of produce. The restaurant purchases 10 shares worth of RTS during the token launch period, which can be stored in the user’s account. A week before harvest the RTS holder receives a notification with information regarding the contents of the harvest, date of pickup, and the opportunity to have their shares sold on the market.

If this restaurant bought their basil from a traditional supplier at a cost of $10 per pound, overall costs would reach approximately $12,000 over the course of ten years. In the RTS ecosystem, the restaurant pre-purchases shares during the token launch period. The cost of one share is $350. Over the course of ten years that price would remain at $350. So, the restaurant makes an initial purchase of 10 shares at $350 a share with the intention of receiving 10 pounds of produce per month After the first 35 months of receiving their basil, the restaurant would have paid off their initial investment through shares of the harvest. This means over 10 years the costs would equal a total of $3,500 and the restaurant would still hold the tradable tokens, which are valued according to the amount of cycles remaining in the farm.

Individual Family

A family in Boulder enjoys making 2 batches of homemade pesto every month. Each batch requires 1 pound of basil. The family wants the basil to be grown locally and finds out about Our Roots.

Option 1: They sign up for an account and acquire two shares worth of basil in RTS tokens. Every time there is a harvest they receive a notification that it’s coming up. The family can come pick up their basil at one of our drop-off hubs. If the family is out of town and won’t need their basil that month, they can choose “Market” on their account and the shares will be sold at our local market. Earnings from the market will be distributed to the family’s account.

Option 2: The family wants local produce but is not ready to acquire tokens. They can come to the market during harvest time and acquire their produce at retail price.

Grocery Store/Farmer’s Market

A local grocery store knows that they on average sell 100 pounds of basil per week. They currently have suppliers to fill three weeks every month and are seeking a new provider to fill the gap. The grocery store connects with Our Roots and pre-buys the shares of produce through the RTS token.

With a 100 pound share we will deliver the produce directly at time of harvest. This produce also provides price stability for the market. Because the crops are grown year round with multiple harvests, we can guarantee a consistent supply without weather restrictions.

Conclusion

Our Roots introduces a revolutionary approach to urban farming. By localizing economic cycles and leaving the value always in the consumer’s hands, we provide a transparent and fair model for everyone to acquire local produce at a highly discounted price point over time relative to traditional models, as well as an opportunity to participate in a digital farming community.

As we expand, more digital tokens will be created to represent shares in each CropBox. More support through large purchasers will stabilize the economic system, which will allow for the deployment of more farms at a faster rate.

Over time we intend to have a distributed network of farms providing fundamental support to communities around the world.

Appendix
Cryptocurrencies are a digital form of value represented on a public ledger that can be transacted without a bank - here is a longer guide https://blockgeeks.com/guides/what-is-cryptocurrency/
Digital tokens are an emerging form of value storage tied to an asset or protocol. It is becoming increasingly common to raise money for a business by pre-selling the digital tokens which will have future use on the platform - https://hbr.org/2017/03/what-initial-coin-offerings-are-and-why-vc-firms-care
Ethereum - www.ethereum.org - A smart contracting platform to transact and build decentralized applications.