How Blockchain-Enabled DAOs Can Transform Cattle Ranching I Believe

Last week, we examined the goal of traceability in beef markets. Traceability helps ensure a safe food supply and keeps markets open.
Further expanding traceability from birth to beef empowers individual choice and supports American ranchers.
USDA doesn’t have to achieve this goal alone. Blockchain-driven agricultural cooperatives could play a crucial role in achieving these goals. As the demand for traceable and sustainable beef grows, blockchain technology and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) offer transformative solutions for American ranchers.
How could a blockchain-driven Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) revolutionize cattle ranching?
What is Blockchain-Driven?
Imagine a group of bookkeepers who work for different companies. The companies recently formed a partnership. They don’t have much history working together, and each company's survival depends on getting its portion of the revenue from the partnership. Record keeping and transparency are vital pieces of their joint venture.
To ensure each company gets its correct share of the profits, they bring their bookkeepers together in one office. They record all transactions on a large whiteboard on the wall. The bookkeepers arrive and leave at the same time every day, ensuring that everyone can see and verify their records and everyone else's.
That’s blockchain in a nutshell.
In industries where partnerships are critical and trust must be built from scratch, blockchain provides a secure, transparent system for transactions without a central authority.
The bookkeepers working in one office where they can see each other's work mirror the decentralized nature of blockchain. In blockchain, all participants (nodes) in the network have access to the entire ledger. They can independently verify the ledger’s accuracy and the validity of new entries.
The whiteboard represents the blockchain ledger, a cryptographically encoded digital record of all transactions executed and confirmed by the network. The ledger is visible to all parties at all times.
The bookkeepers opening and closing the office together symbolize the consensus mechanism used in blockchains. Like all bookkeepers agreeing to open and close the office, record keepers in blockchain technology must gain consensus before a new block can be added to the chain.
The nature of blockchain ensures that all transactions are openly recorded on the ledger and accessible to all involved parties. This helps prevent disputes and ensures that each party receives their due, per the agreement.
Blockchain provides a framework for fairness, transparency, and security in joint ventures without needing a trusted third party. Applications such as supply chain management, financial services, and other sectors where joint ventures are common can benefit from blockchains. One structure that benefits from blockchain technology is a DAO.
What is a DAO?
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) operate through smart contracts, like automated agreements coded into a blockchain. When predefined conditions are met, these programs automatically execute actions (like payments). This ensures that all participants adhere to the rules without the need for intermediaries like lawyers or banks.
DAOs aren’t governed by a single entity like a CEO or Board of Directors. They operate in a distributed manner across a network of computers. Members of a DAO collaboratively discuss and democratically vote on the rules governing their interactions and the organization's operations. Computers then automatically execute these agreements, mitigating the risks of centralized corruption and avoiding single points of failure.
When agreed-upon business conditions are met, the computer executes specified actions without human intervention. This means the organization can run efficiently and consistently without bureaucracy.
All transactions and rules in a DAO are recorded on the blockchain, making them fully transparent and easil