the Agrinet Project | a History

In 2021 I dropped out of Bellarmine University to pursue a project called the Cinchona Corporation. This was my frist big business project and it felt like a winner. I had the cause-- malaria in West Africa. I had the plan-- grow 40 acres of sweet wormwood (artemisia annua) in Bakingili, Cameroon and sell it to a local pharma producer like Cinpharm or Medicam. I thought I had the man-- Joseph M.M., but as it turned out, my investors and I lost a total of $26,000.

This is not Joseph M.M.

All was not lost. The profit model my plan used had it have worked took advantage of homefield advantage. Basically what I observed was that the US and much of the west had eradicated malaria in the 1940s and didn't want to see it return through import, so the Presidents Malaria Initiative was formed to combat the disease and others in sub-saharan Africa. What Cameroon and other governments were doing however was not investing the money in farms and factories with the latest medical technology, instead they bought the medications year-after-year from French and American companies. For context, this is like someone giving you monthly payments to invest in your home's kitchen infrastructure (outside of other expenses) and instead you use the money to pay them to mail you a meal.

That got me thinking and soon I was researching how the USDA coordinates the US food supply. Basically, farmers grow crops based on projected market demand for commodities, they are then sold to distributors who sell to processors and wholesalers, who then sell to the retail and restaurant markets. Then I got this proposal from a Nigerian entrepreneure living in Florida. She wanted to copy aspects of the US meat supply market in Nigeria and was looking for investors. I declined but researched the topic and saw both the perceived need and the traditional ways in which herdsmen were meeting the market's current demand for meat.

As I began to recover mentally from the loss of our investment, I tried to imagine agriculture coordinated the way I'd been coordinated briefly as a DoorDash Driver. That thought is the origin of the Agrinet Project. My first attempt at building it was with Franklin Diaz, whom I hired on the Adolo platform as a contractor. Mr. Diaz quickly realized the task could not be accomplished with the platform. After a year working with a Flutterflow developer, we still didn't have an app, and though we still don't have one today, Calvin Secrest and I are working on it ourselves.

We now have some things we didn't before. Accurate, complete flow charts and text descriptions of the database functions. What's next is UI architechture standards and testing frameworks. The Agrinet is a database that converses with open-source user-facing programs called UI (user interfaces). When these interfaces engage with the Agrinet, they transmit datastreams designed to identify the UI itself, the user and how the user wants to manage agriculture related information. No financal data is handled on the Agrinet, only a blockchain record of who, what, when and where the transaction was about.

We don't know exactly when it will be ready, but if you would like to help, please email us at info@ntari.org