Agrinet Protocol: Distributed Farming for Networked Cities
Agrinet Protocol
A distributed farming standard modeled after TCP/IP to let any grower enter, trade, and exit a proximity-based food network. Agrinet aligns edge production with transparent markets so cities can transform lawns, rooftops, and medians into resilient calories instead of passive costs.
NASA's Christina Milesi showed turf as the largest irrigated crop in the United States.
Missing internet market access costs farmers over $1 trillion every year.
Agriculture produces 30% or more of greenhouse gas emissions while cities heat up.
Why distributed farming now?
From networks to food webs
Before distributed mesh networks for edge computing, Agrinet pushed for distributed farming.
We treat lawns and rooftops like idle servers: millions of micro-sites that can process sunlight into calories instead of bits. The same coordination primitives that route packets can route production, harvests, and payments.
Industrial habits, locked in
Turf lawns built on Poaceae remain a $153 billion aesthetic drain with devastating environmental costs and fossil-fueled food.
Concentrated acreage, tractors, and centralized markets formed before telecommunication existed. Cities adopted the same model even though it wastes 30–40% of produce and starves local ecosystems.
Agriculture defines us
The First, Second, and Third revolutions supercharged health and population.
Yet billions stay hungry even though we produce enough calories to feed everyone. The failure is coordination—not biology. Agrinet restores the subsistence-scale agency families once had, without losing modern transparency.
Market failure we are fixing
- Disconnected growers
Rural and urban farmers lack internet-based market access despite the internet's ~6 billion users.
- Locked-in waste
Turf landscapes are pure aesthetic elitism that consume water and chemicals while cities battle heat islands.
- Ecological risk
Agriculture emissions rival transportation's carbon pollution, and climate change cuts crop yields.
Common objections
"Too chaotic," "too small," "too messy." Distributed farming is dismissed as vermin-prone or wasteful. But chaos comes from missing coordination—not from distributed production. Agrinet provides shared forecasts, versioned plans, and transparent audit logs so every yard and rooftop acts like a reliable node, not a random patch.
Until now no system could coordinate billions of micro-plots. Agrinet changes that with protocol-level messaging and smart contracts that negotiate planting, labor, and surplus redirection in real time.
How Agrinet Protocol works
Join on demand
Any participant can join a proximity-based market, accept a grow contract, and exit when the season ends. No central gatekeepers; local validators maintain uptime and reputation.
Track every calorie
Planting plans, irrigation schedules, and harvest logs are digitized so sunlight-to-calorie conversion is visible, auditable, and optimizable for any neighborhood.
Route surplus fast
Surplus is routed like packets: hop to the nearest demand node, verified by peers, with fallback paths when weather or labor changes. Waste drops while freshness rises.
AGPL-3 licensed
The protocol and reference stack live in the Agrinet main branch under AGPL-3, keeping community standards transparent and forkable.
Where this is headed
2025 pilot cities
Lawn conversions, rooftop builds, and highway median plantings share live telemetry and market data to prove the distributed farm mesh works at city scale.
Connected cooperatives
Neighborhood co-ops trade labor, logistics, and processing capacity, turning "lawns as servers" into resilient food clusters with verifiable outputs.
Global interoperability
Protocol extensions map to global markets so a rooftop in Louisville or a balcony in Lagos can sell into nearby demand without surrendering autonomy.