Every event, in order, each one hashed to the one before it.
A provenance claim is worth exactly as much as the record behind it. This is the record: ten events on one patch across one season, logged as they happened, in a chain where changing any line breaks every line below it.
Patch B2, Curdle Hill, 2025–26.
Winter wheat, a quarter acre, drilled on 14 October and delivered as flour the following August.
RecordDSE-PATCH-B2-2026
-
12 Oct 2025 · 08:14
Patch allocatedB2, Curdle Hill — winter wheat, quarter acre. Fixed price £220.
Platform
7c41f0a92e6b -
14 Oct 2025 · 16:40
DrilledVariety Extase at 352 seeds/m², 3cm, 4.1ha pass including this patch.
K. Cooper
a0d3b81547cf -
29 Oct 2025 · 09:02
Emergence recordedGS09. Establishment counted at 289 plants/m². Slug pellets not required.
C. Ireland
38ee2c740b19 -
06 Feb 2026 · 11:27
Tiller count742 tillers/m². Above the five-year mean for this field by about six per cent.
C. Ireland
b16a9f03d5e2 -
02 Apr 2026 · 07:55
GS31 reachedFirst node detectable. Plant growth regulator and first fungicide applied same day.
K. Cooper
4f72c0e8a361 -
08 May 2026 · 14:03
Flag leaf outGS39. T2 fungicide applied. Septoria pressure moderate after a wet April.
K. Cooper
d95b170ce4af -
21 May 2026 · 10:18
Ear count498 ears/m². The first number all year that predicts anything.
C. Ireland
2c8340f7b6da -
17 Jul 2026 · 06:30
Moisture reading18.4 per cent. Too wet to cut. Forecast reviewed daily from here.
Platform
6ba1e29d0374 -
09 Aug 2026 · 15:12
Harvested8.1 t/ha at 14.9 per cent moisture. Weighbridge ticket 20261194.
K. Cooper
e470c81af5b3 -
11 Aug 2026 · 09:44
Allocation set aside25kg milled to wholemeal, bagged in three lots, held for dispatch.
Platform
01fd6b3e829c
Each line carries a hash of itself and of the line above it. Change any entry and every hash below it stops matching, which is the only property of a blockchain that anybody actually needed.
Why there is no token, no coin and no chain.
Agricultural provenance is the single most over-blockchained problem in Britain. There have been consortia, pilots, white papers and at least one farm-to-fork platform that raised money on the strength of a distributed ledger and then quietly moved to a database.
The property everybody actually wants is tamper-evidence: if somebody edits the drilling date after the fact, that edit should be visible. A hash chain gives you that. It is about forty lines of code, it runs on the same server as everything else, and it costs nothing per entry.
What a public blockchain adds is decentralised consensus — protection against the operator themselves being dishonest. That is a real problem in some settings. It is not this one, because if you do not trust the farm then a token signed by the farm does not help you either.
What gets recorded, and by whom.
Automatic entries
- Allocation
- Written when a patch is taken, with the fixed price
- Weighbridge
- Ticket number pulled from the weighbridge record
- Camera stills
- One a month from the fixed fence post, timestamped
- Dispatch
- Written when the consignment leaves
Entered by a person
- Field operations
- Drilling, spraying, harvest — Kaleb Cooper or the operator
- Agronomy
- Counts, stages and assessments — Charlie Ireland
- Corrections
- Appended, never overwritten, with the reason attached
What is never in it
- Your name
- Held against the order, not the field record
- Prices paid by anybody else
- Not yours to see, and not ours to publish
- Estimates dressed as measurements
- If it was estimated, the line says estimated
A correction is a new line, not an edit. The wrong line stays visible, which is the point of keeping a chain rather than a spreadsheet.
The line we got wrong, and left in.
On 6 February the tiller count on B2 was first logged as 642 per square metre. It was 742. Somebody transposed it into the tablet in a wind that would take your hat off.
It was corrected the following morning. Both lines are in the record, the second one carrying the reason, and the first one is not going anywhere.
A provenance record that only ever contains flattering entries is a marketing asset, not a record. This one contains a transposition error, a moisture reading that stopped the combine for three weeks, and a durum crop that came in at under a third of its expectation. That is what makes the good lines worth reading.
- 642
- what was typed
- 742
- what it was
- Both
- still in the record
Watch it as well as read it.
The camera on your own patch
A fixed post, a monthly still, and a live feed when there is something to see.
The seed-to-harvest tracker
What happens agronomically, and what we tell you when it does.
All the cameras
Fourteen fixed cameras, including the one on the weighbridge where these numbers come from.
The record, questioned.
Yes, as a plain text file with the hashes intact, so you can verify the chain yourself with a command-line tool and no faith in us at all.
It stays. Records from previous seasons are kept indefinitely, because a provenance claim that expires is not a provenance claim.
The patch-holder, in full. Anybody else sees the field-level operations without the allocation lines, because those are somebody’s order history.
The grid.
Twenty-eight patches, each with a record of its own from the day it is taken.
