OTTAWA — Fred Baker holds a week-old lamb on his thigh at his farm south of Ottawa and scans its yellow ear tag with a device the size of a label-maker.

“If I find one that’s a little bit thin, I read his tag and I can link it back to his mother,” he says over the baa-ing of other sheep in the enclosure. “Then I can find out if his mother’s got mastitis, if she’s not feeding him properly, whatever—everything’s right here at my fingertips.”

A unique identity number for the lamb lying placidly over Baker’s leg is coded into an RFID chip within the tag, which the animal will wear its whole life. That number, in turn, is linked to a desktop database package called Farm Works, which syncs with the handheld reader. That’s miles ahead of the paper records everyone used to use, but in 2023 it’s archaic technology with a crucial weakness.

Because the database with the dossier on each animal sits in a file in a proprietary format on Baker’s own computer, the information in it doesn’t travel beyond his laneway, he says. “Nobody else gets access to it.”

The solution, Baker and the national Canadian Sheep Federation hope, is new technology called AgroLedger. The federation intends to put Canada’s sheep on the blockchain, creating a distributed database anybody involved in the ovine economy can use to find out just about anything about a particular animal, using a smartphone app.

AgroLedger is a response to impending new regulatory mandates from the federal government, requiring a new central database for livestock movements, says Corlena Patterson, the sheep federation’s executive director.

That federal demand is meant to facilitate disease tracing, but building a whole system only to track animals’ movements for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency would cost the industry money while promising little reward. “I liken it to a black hole into which we’re expected to throw data and dollars and not get much back in return—unless and until there’s a disease outbreak, and you hope that never materializes,” Patterson says.

AgroLedger is to do that tracking but also much more, turning it into a source of value for the people who breed, raise and sell sheep.

Bearded, bespectacled and ball-capped, with an incongruous stud in his left earlobe, Baker began raising sheep in 1978. At its peak, when Baker combined farming with a day job at Statistics Canada in Ottawa, his operation had 400 sheep. Now, working alone at age 75, he maintains about 50 ewes. Lambing season has just finished, so he has another 135 or so babies on his hands.

The afternoon is muggy and mosquitoes are swarming, but the sheep are still in their winter quarters because Baker’s fence needs fixing before he lets them out to pasture. A couple of lambs whose mothers’ milk Baker has been supplementing nose insistently around him.

The young males will mainly be sold from the farm for halal butchering, while some young ewes will become breeding stock; Baker selects for genetic resistance to a fatal illness called scrapie and for attentive, low-maintenance mothers. Others will go to auction.

Baker jokes that at his age, he’s got fewer good days ahead of him than bad days behind him. But he’s as keen on the future as anybody: He’s just spent nearly $40,000 on a New Holland Discbine, a tractor-towed implement for cutting hay. He waves a hand toward where it sits a few yards from the sheep enclosure, its clean paint half-glowing an orangey-red under the grey of the clouds.

“If anybody wants a meme for optimism, it’s right there,” he says wryly. “Somebody my age buying a brand-new piece of hay equipment.”

Forty years ago, Baker was part of a small group of farmers who tried to sell branded meat to Ottawa shops, from animals that were well cared-for and fed grass and corn grown without insecticides. Not organic, exactly, but ecologically minded. The effort failed.

“We couldn’t prove the animals we were delivering came off our farms,” he says. “Guys came in behind us and said, ‘We can sell you lambs cheaper that are just as good as those.’”

Even now, Canada has tracking systems for live animals to fight the spread of disease, and tracking systems for animal products for food safety, but the chain doesn’t run unbroken from an animal’s birth to its consumer, Patterson said.

An on-farm database doesn’t solve that problem, but AgroLedger will.

“The technology that we use has the capacity to calculate right down to the food-mile how local that product really is,” Patterson says. A package of lamb at a grocery store could have a QR code to scan for information about its origins and treatment, including whether it was raised under a specific quality-assurance regime and if it’s certified as disease-free.

“The goal, ultimately, of our system is to scan an animal’s ID and get a 360-degree view of its production history instantaneously,” Patterson says.

Not every detail might be included in the report someone scanning a pack of lamb-burgers at a supermarket could see. Government inspectors are entitled to detailed information about players in the agricultural supply chain that shouldn’t necessarily be public, she says. Grocery shoppers don’t need their dinner’s family tree or “people information” like Baker’s phone number, for instance.

But where the animals have spent their lives? No problem, says Patterson. “Sheep themselves are much less fussy about being tracked.”

The sheep federation formed a subsidiary, called PrüvIT, to build AgroLedger.

“I’m the CEO and right now I’m the staff,” Patterson says.

PrüvIT has a contracted software lead and has used the Canada Summer Jobs Program to hire students for programming and design—13 start this year, Patterson says, and she has nearly 10 applicants for each position—with others contributing to short-term projects.

“They’re dying to develop something new that nobody’s done before,” she says. “I mean, you’ve got to rein that in to a certain extent. But they also have no preconceived notions about what’s not possible.”

Facial-recognition technology for the sheep is in the works, so farmers can eventually dispense with the ear tags (or at least the need to scan them up close to get access to an AgroLedger record) and potentially use AI to passively monitor the animals’ welfare.

Sheep hide stress well, Patterson says, in part because they’re always a bit freaked out. “They do think everything’s trying to kill them all the time.”

Looking for signs of illness or thirst or other problems with cameras rather than using the traditional method of checking for stress—taking a blood sample and testing it for stress hormones—should make for happier sheep, she says, especially when they’re in transit.

“We’re excited about expanding the ID part into welfare in the coming months and year.”

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency is treating AgroLedger as a pilot project, hoping to learn about blockchain-based regulatory tools, spokesperson Patrick Girard told The Logic in an email. Patterson says AgroLedger is being written so it can be adapted to other industries.

“We’re not a traditional agtech startup,” she says. “Most agtech startups are a tech person with a good idea trying to figure out where it fits into industry, and they seem to garner a lot of investment. I don’t want to diss anybody’s efforts—I think it’s important that people try to innovate in the space. But I see a ton of investment going to technologies that never make it in the real world.”

Financing has not been easy. “We are farmers and farming people by trade. We tend to be quite humble,” Patterson says. “We’re not experts in pitching to venture capitalists, that’s for sure.”

But PrüvIT did exhibit at the Animal Agtech Innovation Summit in San Francisco in March, and has invitations to other such events.

“We find in animal agriculture, specifically livestock production, we’re way behind in the adoption of technology. So we’re really here to spark a movement, I guess. We’re always open to investment if folks want to invest in real technologies that will do real things,” Patterson says.

Ten years after the idea of a shared database kicked off, AgroLedger is in testing, with 25 “early adopters” launching it on their farms in January and a new wave coming online in June.

The new traceability regulations will likely come into force in late 2024 and if the CFIA agrees, AgroLedger will move into wide release for sheep farmers then.

“Our hope is that, within the end of [that] year, we have the go-ahead to start onboarding anybody who wants to use it,” Patterson says.