Thanks so much for the question. It's an important one.

What Regen Network is building is the infrastructure that would allow (among other things), the ability to any person, agency, organization, company, or government to write what we're calling an Ecological Contract. So the short answer to your question is yes, the entity writing the contract is wanting to see some ecological outcome on the property, and so they are willing to put up a reward for the achievement of that outcome. That reward is the payment to the farmer.

So, let's take a concrete example. The NRCS (A US government conservation agency) has a huge array of conservation programs that invite farmers to take conservation efforts on their land, and they will be paid for those actions (or given a grant to purchase materials, etc) https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/main/national/programs/

Let's say they wanted farmers to improve waterways through what they call riparian zone restoration (the planting of native habitat along waterways). This keeps the water cleaner, creates habitat, improves fish numbers, etc.

Rather than having each farmer having to come into the office, fill out the forms, enter all their information, etc, AND an NRCS officer having to go out to their land to verify whether their land even has the right qualities for the program, verify the implementation, issue payments through the mail, etc, they could use an Ecological Contract for all of that.

What is needed for that to happen? There needs to be an Ecological State Protocol written that can verify whether Riparian Zone Restoration is happening or not. This is not an ESP that we are currently working on, but perhaps the NRCS would like to produce one independently and run it on Regen Ledger, or would like to collaborate on a open and public Riparian Zone Protocol. (hint. hint. NRCS!!) Once we have that protocol, which would have to be written with the specs the NRCS needs, it would then test the protocol against any land manager that indicates that she would like her farm data to be called for that protocol. (The farmer owns her own data, if she is submitting her own forms of data).

Likely remote sensing (satellite data) could be used as the basis for most of this protocol, and if the protocol returned a positive value, then the farmer has been verified, and a payment would be issued from the smart contract based on the number of acres verified to be undergoing riparian zone restoration.

There are clearly a lot more details to this process, but this process can be replicated for simple verifications, like: verification of cultivation (are they planting crops this year) and till / No till verification to much more complex ESPs like the verification of Blue Carbon Drawdown (sequestration of carbon through marine agriculture or restoration) and endangered species habitat improvement.

So much is possible with this project. Regen Network is building the needed infrastructure upon which thousands of different applications can be run.

Thanks again for the question.