I know nothing about farming so please bear with me. I see what you trying to achieve that will be great !! I still don't understand the mechanics of the system and the use of blockchain.
 

• Farmers will need hardware systems to autonomously grow food (FTF is working on engineering these initial systems and they most definitely will be "application specific" )

Can you expand on that. Can you give a example what that system will look like ? 

• The first tier integration of a blockchain - I'm hypothesizing - would be to track and secure (through a public ledger) the production of every plant grown in the network (what an upgrade from farming today right?).  By "secure" I would define as the anonymous (or not) validation that: "this particular plant has been grown to standards as agreed upon by the consensus of the platform" (i.e. no detection of harmful chemicals founds (pesticides, fungicides, etc.); no disease witnessed during production cycle; etc.) 

How you gonna track all that ? I mean  how you gonna validate and how you gonna input it  on the blockchain ?  How could we prevent fraud ?

• The second tier integration of a blockchain would be with regards to monetization and incentive structure for the farmer's themselves.  As this would operate in the form factor of a decentralized neural network - there will inevitably nodes in the platform that are more efficient due to the input effort and knowledge of the corresponding farmer (THIS is where I believe the potential of a DAC TRULY exists.  It's a network that can operate incorruptibly, but enables the input of human resources that can be capitalized.)  I believe the network should objectively reward the most efficient farming systems as these are what the rest of the network nodes will strive to replicate and pull information from.
  
  How do we incentivize a structure that rewards farmers for sharing information to make food production orders of magnitude more efficient, orders of magnitude less expensive, orders of magnitude safer for consumption & the environment, and completely incorruptible? 
  
  

Don't understand the second tier at all. I don't see where is  the incentive  for a farmer to share any information.

I don't see the link between the two tier [/list]

So delulo asked me a question in a PM - I'm posting it here for others to think about (with his permission) and my response below.  I would love to generate conversation around the need, or not, for the production of physical items (specifically food) to have integrated blockchains.

Quote from: delulo on September 15, 2014, 10:29:02 pm

Hey, can it be said (in short) why a DAC (decentralized ledger) is required for the robot food production idea you have?

Quote from: G1ng3rBr34dM4n on September 17, 2014, 05:32:10 pm

Hey Delulo!

I *think* a DAC would be best suited for the monetization of a distributed food production platform and for securing the integrity (health safety) of the food produced. 

Looking for people who can help me prove whether its necessary or not.  I believe it is and I'm willing to put in the research to find out

I may have missed the part where  you explain how exactly you intend to use the blockchain, is sound interesting but is  is still vague. Can you please explains the details a bit more ? 

Absolutely 100% agree this should be done ASAP. Keep the good work drltc we all appreciate your contribution. Thanks.

"Freedom account" create a Bitshares X account called "Freedom. For each donation receive in this account you give back some Free.

When there is enough money, a minimum of 51 delegates need to sign in order to use money in this account. 

We will use the  FREE money on the  FREEDOM account  for (please fell free to add more suggestions)  :

1. we gonna buy a island in the Pacific where we will create  the a country called well .. Freedom. It will be the most free country in the world. Every user that ever donated to the free account will be a automatically a citizen and will be welcome to live there.
2.  to defend legally anyone in any country that's in trouble because he used blockchain technologies
3. make about .. 101 clones of bytemaster
4. throw Bitshares parties all over the world where the booze is ... free

Very nice !!
We need people from our community to comment and answer question on that post. Before it is turning negative. And please don't  forget to upvote

Pas beacoup

Here's what happens if the price goes down:

- If the price of BitUSD goes down from 30 to 25, then you can buy 100 BitUSD for 25 BTSX, pay 2500 BTSX to cover and unlock the pot of 6000 BTSX.
- You originally paid 3000 BTSX when you did the short sale.  When you bought the BitUSD to cover, you had to pay 2500 BTSX -- but as soon as you hit the Cover button, you unlocked the 6000 BTSX from the pot.  So you made 500 BTSX profit on the deal.

Here's what happens if the price goes up:

- If the price of BitUSD goes up from 30 to 35, then you can buy 100 BitUSD for 35 BTSX, pay 3500 BTSX to cover and unlock the pot of 6000 BTSX.
- You originally paid 3000 BTSX when you did the short sale.  When you bought the BitUSD to cover, you had to pay 3500 BTSX -- but as soon as you hit the Cover button, you unlocked the 6000 BTSX from the pot.  So you lost 500 BTSX on the deal.

If the BitUSD price goes all the way up to 60 BTSX, then you would never want to cover -- if you had 100 BitUSD, you could simply sell it for more than 6000 BTSX instead of covering.  The system really doesn't want this to happen, it essentially means people would be defaulting on their debts to the system which would wreck the whole economic theory it's based on.  People like me talking about "underwater shorts" on this forum are referring to this situation, not what we wear in the swimming pool

So to prevent underwater shorts, when the price rises to 45 BTSX -- halfway from the beginning (30 BTSX) to the "waterline" (60 BTSX) -- the system will reach into the pot, pull out some collateral, buy BitUSD with it, and cover.  This is referred to as "margin call," it is basically the system foreclosing on the debt.  The system will assess you a big 5% fee when this happens, so you might want to monitor the prices and hit the Cover button yourself when the price is getting close to the margin call price of 45 BTSX.

The GUI will helpfully tell you the margin call price.  You can also hit the Cover button to pay back some of the debt -- no collateral will be unlocked until the debt is paid in full, but a partial payment will increase the margin call price.

Very clear, wiki material