Conecta: traceable cattle ranching explained to producers

Conecta cross-checks farms' environmental data with cattle transport permits to show whether a meatpacker's entire supply chain, including breeding and rearing farms, is free of deforestation. Joining is voluntary, and ranchers arrived suspicious: they had had problems with other platforms, feared their data would end up with the government, found a free tool strange and didn't trust NGOs. On the other side, meatpackers and retailers needed to understand why they should pay for the service. We had to explain blockchain without talking about blockchain, and invite without sounding like a demand.

There were two contracts with Friends of the Earth Brazil, responsible for bringing Conecta to meatpackers and retailers under the Partnerships for Responsible Agriculture Program. In the first, in 2022, we put together the launch kit. The animation for ranchers presents Conecta as a work tool, "managing your property in the palm of your hand", with a woman and a man rancher as characters and consistently positive language: we talk about control over your own data, never about monitoring or penalties. The second half of the film teaches how to sign up, from download to password, and the infographic repeats this step by step in a format made for WhatsApp, the channel meatpackers' purchasing teams use with suppliers. For companies, we made an editable presentation and four newsletters.

In the second contract, between late 2022 and early 2023, a new animation spoke directly to the market: a conveyor belt represents the blockchain, cattle with a green seal move on to the meatpacker and the store shelf, and those with a red seal are left out. We also produced a podcast episode.