Valueflows

Summary Table

  1. The Problem It Solves

On many farms these days, there are lots of software applications that can’t be integrated with each other.  Also farm applications can’t just send information or requests to other organizations in their network, for example marketplaces or food hubs or suppliers.  In more and more countries, every link in a supply chain will need to feed data into a trace of what has gone into their products, sometimes called a Digital Product Passport.  That’s hard when software applications don’t talk to each other or the data is not compatible.  People in ag are often the best stewards of their land, but it is hard with existing software, which doesn’t have ways to integrate ecological data with farm data so that eaters can see the provenance of their food and its effects on our world.

The bottom line: Valueflows is designed to connect resource flows of all types wherever they lead, backwards or forwards, to provide the data needed to coordinate the flows, and understand what went into our food and what effects we have on the earth our home.

  1. What Valueflows Is

Valueflows is an ontology (vocabulary) for the distributed networks of the next economy, to coordinate the creation, distribution, and exchange of economic resources. It plans and records resource flows connecting many agents (people, organizations, ecological agents). It pays extra attention to experimental and solidarity economic networks, while still fully supporting conventional businesses and supply chains.  For example, it is designed to support

  • coordination of economic activity both inside and between organizations, an enterprise is not assumed;
  • reciprocity with or without money, money is not assumed;
  • ecological agents as part of the network; externalities documented as resource flows.

Valueflows uses a general economic model, but is very much suited to food and ag, including farm operations and food distribution.  As a flow-oriented model, Valueflows can coordinate whole networks as easily as operations of one organization, including regions and circular economies.  But it also works well for individual farms and other organizations.

The effort came out of a “movement” among software developers around 2015 called the open app ecosystem, which emphasized smaller open source apps that could be assembled into suites of software for organizations and networks, with interoperability.  A group of developers interested in economic software got together and birthed Valueflows as one piece of the glue for that puzzle.

A core influence is the REA (Resources, Events, Agents) ontology developed in academia starting in 1982.  REA provides a simple and elegant model for planning and recording real-world economic activity with any material or service flow, as opposed to only those flows that are monetized – expenses, income, assets and liabilities –  although those can be derived. To REA we have added some concepts found in various economic groups (for example recipes for planning work, offers and requests), and ecological accounting, as well as made the ontology more implementation-ready and friendly to distributed protocols.

  1. Why It Matters: For Farmers and Supply Chain Players
  • Time savings and data accuracy due to interoperability within food/ag networks, like the rest of the standards here.
  • Supports creating a library of “recipes” combined into “blueprints” by type of farm, to help farmers get going with Valueflows-based operational software; farmers can feed back into the library too, building a shared commons.
  • Supports connected resource flows from the beginning to the end of the value chain, giving “provenance” information for food products at any stage, for health tracing and for information eaters want to know (locality, sustainability, etc.).
  • Able to track ecological flows along with production and distribution flows, also can be integrated with a sensor ontology, giving better feedback for regenerative farming.
  • Supports supply chains well, because of the connected resource flow information.
  1. Why It Matters:  For Developers and Product Owners
  • Valueflows does not seek to compete with existing farm or food hub software, nor existing food ontologies, rather to help with interoperability.  One specific case: there is farm software under development (see GrowGood below) which will have a Valueflows api, and aims to be interoperable with the GOAT community of applications and standards.
  • Valueflows can add flexible track/trace capability to existing food ontologies, and supports any configuration of network or supply chain.  It can also support farm-adjacent economic flows, such as farm equipment, or non-food products created on-farm like soap or textiles.
  • We propose a renewed mapping between Valueflows and DFC, first for creation of a translation layer, and then for mutual enhancement by considering how to blend the vocabularies  (We did a mapping a few years ago, it needs updating.)  The same could apply to FarmOS / CFC, where there are differences with DFC.  We would like to contribute to strengthening the semantic interoperability across the broader open agricultural technology ecosystem.
  1. Getting Started (The “Toolbox”)
  1. Governance and Alignment

During the initial years of heavy development, generally 5 – 15 volunteer contributors made decisions with informal consensus.  The people were drawn together by a desire to support more fair and sustainable economic experiments on the ground, and to help facilitate the open source software commons for these groups.  Once the first versions were published, the focus turned to getting experience by helping new Valueflows-based software projects, which has been a slow process.  Bob Haugen and Lynn Foster of Mikorizal have been the primary maintainers in recent years, bringing back learnings to the ontology, with the help of its open source community.  Several cycles of learning occurred before the first stable release in Feb. 2026, v1.0.0, with more to come.

We look forward to bringing more formal governance and organization, bringing together maintainers, users, and developers working in separate technical ecosystems.

  1. The Ecosystem

This page in the Valueflows appendix lists most of the open source implementations.  It includes more kinds of applications than food/farm apps.

Most relevant apps for food/ag:

  • GrowGood, an operational farm app with integrated sensor data, with plans to network within food networks using Valueflows and JSON-LD (in development), and plans to develop the farm blueprint library mentioned above.  We have talked with OFN, and would like to be able to interoperate with OFN as a farm source.
  • New York Carbon Farm Network, a textile supply chain from farm (sheep/alpaca) to yarn for a textile designer cooperative, planning video (28 minutes)
  • ThePivot.Earth is coordinating a project just starting in the Fraser Lowland bioregion, focused on food and regeneration.  We expect this to solidify a part of Valueflows left out of v1.0.0 as not tested enough: support for bioregional and community level planning and analysis for food anti-fragility.