Briefings and analysis.

Our full submission to the Department for Business and Trade’s Smart Data: multi-sector call for evidence (CP 1608), answering twenty questions on agrifood, cross-sector governance and trade. The argument in one line: consent makes data shareable, but provenance is what makes shared data usable as evidence. Includes a proposed minimum provenance envelope, the distinction between verified and true, and three costed feasibility pilots.

A two-page discussion brief on extending cattle traceability into whole-chain evidence. The new cattle service replaces the Cattle Tracing System in 2027, alongside electronic identification for newborn calves in England: it will tell you who an animal is and where it has been. This sets out how a provenance layer connects the veterinary, laboratory, market, abattoir and processor evidence around the animal, using the official animal identity as the anchor rather than building another database. Includes the five steps applied to a cattle chain, three design considerations, and a focused first pilot.

A two-page discussion brief on keeping agri-food carbon data verifiable from farm to table. A single loaf can contain wheat from many farms, blended at the grain store and again at the mill, so farm-level figures usually disappear into sector averages. This sets out how a provenance layer keeps each grain lot linked through every blend, with its proportion, methodology and version intact, so a bread footprint can be built from real farm figures and lower-carbon growers are recognised rather than hidden. Includes the five steps applied to a grain-to-bread chain, three design considerations, and a focused first pilot.

A twenty-question self-assessment across five sections — source and identity, transformation, versions, auditability and resilience — designed to show you where your evidence chain is strong and where it becomes fragile. Also available as an interactive online version.

Europe has built the legal architecture for who may access data. It has not yet built the equivalent for what must persist once that data becomes a scientific or regulatory claim. A proposal for a European minimum evidence record, ahead of EHDS implementing acts due by March 2027.

A small, stable core of nine provenance relationships that should travel with a consequential scientific or regulatory result when it leaves the system that produced it — published for open use, ahead of the EHDS implementing acts due by March 2027.

The missing layer in modern data infrastructure: audit trails, provenance, cross-organisational evidence, cryptographic integrity, and the point at which trusted systems stop being enough.

Brazil's EU beef authorisation was withdrawn over antimicrobial guarantees, and EUDR adds a second evidence-intensive market-access regime in December 2026. What a verifiable provenance layer would need to prove — and what it cannot.

A conceptual look at what a shared, verifiable chain-of-custody layer would need to look like in a food-safety supply chain — and an honest note on why this stays illustrative, not a claim of an existing deployment.