Why a farmers market?
Farmers produce value (assets), yet they receive very little in return. Small farms produce over 80% of the food in the US (surprising right!).
On average, successful farms only earn about 8 cents for every dollar they spend. The unsuccessful farms actually loose money and build debt, while still producing their product.
Traditional platforms that non-agricultural businesses might use (like the big 3), often ban agricultural organizations and businesses from selling or trading their goods. Farmers desperately need a new decentralized solution.
Why Stellar?
Using the decentralized exchange built into the stellar protocol, farmers are able to buy and sell to entirely new markets, they no longer have to settle for using cash (fiat) as a means to run and grow their business. Now they can trade directly with their consumers and suppliers.
Maybe they need hay to feed their cows so that they can produce milk; instead of selling the milk for fiat then buying hay they can trade directly with their hay supplier.
As you can imagine farms are very seasonal, by creating a general token (as a sort of credit) for their business they can actually create liquidity, presell their crops and thrive through the times they would normally suffer.
Small farms like u-pick blueberries who struggle to charge the right price according to market demand ($2 instead of $5), now have a mechanism using buy/sell offers on the exchange to get the right price... taking that 8 cents on every dollar up to maybe 50 cents or more, enabling them to succeed and grow.
Anara Farmers Market wont be limited to just farms, we fully expect grocery stores, co-ops and individuals to create markets for their products as well. Imagine Trader Joes or Natural Grocers creating a market or joining a co-op. They could then create a token which can be awarded to shoppers and useable within the co-op.
What the market does.
The Anara farmers market is being built to enable anyone with an farm related business (anywhere in the world) to create a presence on the stellar blockchain. Our goal is to make it easy to create and trade assets, market to the right people and build trust in their organization.
We do that by embracing all of the features built into the Stellar protocol.
How does it work?
When you create a new market at Anara, you're creating a stellar home domain and building your stellar.toml. As I'm sure you already know the stellar.toml is used by wallets, exchanges and businesses to identify and trust your assets, this is the first essential step to digitally representing the value you produce because it enables anyone to buy and sell your assets.
Once you have a domain, farmers can start to build trust and grow their market. They do that by creating assets, either as a general token for their business or a token for every product they make; anchoring the product to the token. The more their assets are trusted (via trustlines) the bigger their market grows.
Conclusion
The Stellar blockchain has created an exciting platform for business, help us build the future markets on the platform and vote for the Anara Farmers Market.
Links
https://anara.farm
