Everything humans do can be reduced to a stream of events that produce a continuous outcome. Cause and effect. I believe that many of the current farm management systems and most of the logistic software solutions are based on state management instead of event management. This is why I think events are more important than the state of the farm.
You can’t easily track changes of state over time, without events.
When building a farm management system or a logistics platform, most people would go with the route of a central database that contains the records of the farm like sales, inventory and customers. This information is important but not very usable for behavioral queries. Things like: Give me the top 5 most sold items of the season for customers in a city compared to last year. With a database or spreadsheet, you would need to join multiple table and sub-queries to come to an answer. An event based system can filter the stream to get to the data based on meta-attributes. Much simpler and concise.
Analytics are required and only possible by an event based system.
Every farm that is trying to run a good business, is required to keep track of all the activities involved in the work. This tracking mechanism is inherently event based and not state based. It is conducted by and actor that executes an action and produces a measurable outcome. You can’t analyze the behaviors and improve upon them if you only measure amounts (state). A farms needs systems that support behavioral analytics to improve productivity and that only an event based system can support that.
You can derive state from events, not the other way around.
Trying to tell how and when you planted a bed can’t be derived from a table with the amount of seeds you bought. But you can tell the amount of seeds used in the farm by aggregating the planting events of a season. If you can derive state from events, that also means that you can generate multiple types of states (analytics) from a set of events. Farms can run a multitude of data analytics techniques in an event based system, which can be quite challenging in a state based system, which in return can help farms measure and achieve better their operational goals.
Operating a farm is event all the way down
As soon as you embrace the “event based” system, you can see that all the possible actions that are executed in and around the farming business can be expressed as actions. Inputs Procuring, Planting, Harvesting, Selling, Planing. Every actions is executed in conjunction of multiple actors and produces an outcome that is measurable and verifiable. This means that we can also integrate farms easily with other systems that are event-based as well. Processing facilities, logistic partners, distribution networks, wholesales outlets, all can represent their interactions with the agricultural assets in event-shaped data which in result can bring better traceability and data analysis capabilities to our system. Best ways to plan ahead, best ways to understand the market needs, best way to take care of the planet, the farmer and the consumer.
A Distributed Food System, has to be an event-based system.