Digital Farm Wallet | Completed December 2025
From verifiable credentials to scalable digital farm identity
The Digital Farm Wallet project investigated how farmers and agricultural organisations could establish trusted digital identities, exchange verified information and reduce the need to repeatedly collect the same agricultural data.
Building on earlier TANZ research into decentralised information sharing and verifiable credentials, the project progressed from digital wallet prototypes to the development of a farm registry and connected agricultural information infrastructure.
Farmers and growers interact with multiple organisations that maintain information about their identities, farming activities, land, resource consents and regulatory obligations.
Although much of this information already exists in authoritative records, it is distributed across separate systems and is not consistently connected to identifiable farming enterprises.
Establishing trusted farm identities manually, one enterprise at a time, presents a significant barrier to widespread adoption.
The project examined digital identity, verifiable credentials and digital wallets as mechanisms for securely exchanging agricultural information.
It also investigated how authoritative public datasets could be assembled to create a trusted digital identity and contextual record for a farming enterprise.
Technical development included a prototype farm registry, cloud-based infrastructure, knowledge graph technologies and AI-assisted information processing.
Information from land parcels, resource consents, consent conditions, rating records and New Zealand Business Number records was used to establish relationships between farming enterprises, their locations, activities and regulatory obligations.
By the project's completion in December 2025, a prototype registry had been established containing 1,204 farming enterprises in the Selwyn District associated with active resource consents.
The work demonstrated how existing authoritative information could be assembled and connected systematically rather than requiring every farming enterprise to manually recreate its digital identity.
The project also investigated digital credential technologies and the potential for farmers or authorised representatives to verify and claim their farm identities.
The Digital Farm Wallet project established an important technical foundation for agricultural interoperability.
It demonstrated a progression from exchanging individual verified credentials to establishing connected, reusable information about farming enterprises.
The research also showed how knowledge graphs and AI-assisted analysis could help interpret the relationships between farms, land, activities and regulatory obligations.
These findings created opportunities to extend agricultural information services beyond identity and data exchange into environmental analysis, regulatory intelligence and broader agricultural decision support.
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