Overview

Globally, around 40% of people are employed in the agriculture sector, it contributes $5,084,800 million of total worldwide production, making it contribute 6.4% in the global economy. But it remains one of the most outdated sectors in terms of technical development.

After the crop leaves the farm, it follows various levels of the supply chain to make it reach the final consumer. Ensuring trust, transparency, and efficiency from farm to groceries is a tough task and is one of the major backlogs that this sector faces. This industry is a little less explored but revolutionary blockchain technology can help to combat these problems in the first place. This technology has drastically changed many industries like retail, automobile, and healthcare. This technology of a ledger system that allows peer to peer transaction of any commodity and is tamper-proof, has the potential to bring a much-needed change in the agricultural sector.

Application of Blockchain Agriculture

The various things that be evolved better in this sector through blockchain are:

One of the biggest challenges that this sector faces is tracking and paying for the delivery of food. Both sellers and buyers have agents that increase the size of the chain, making the product more expensive than its original value and is time-consuming

With the existence of blockchain technology, this problem can be resolved easily. Since there would be a single distributed ledger, the communication between the buyer and seller would improve, meaning, there would be a decrease in the number of agents. With features like traceability and suitability, farmers can directly contact restaurants or individual buyers and can get a larger share for their sales. It will also remove the exploitation done by intermediaries to both parties.

Crop and Food Production

Using the concept of smart farming, IoT sensors can fetch important information like soil quality, water level, details of fertilizers, etc. It will help in increasing both the quality of the farming process and as well as producing crops.

Weather Crisis control

The issue of unpredictable weather causes a lot of problems to the field. In the case of excessive rain, it is difficult for crops to tolerate flooding. No rain makes the crops dry. And too much heat too kills the crops. And consumers are never made aware of these situations and hence never knowing the actual reason behind price surge. Blockchain can help farmers get easy claims through smart contracts.

Managing Agricultural Finance

Lack of transparency in credit history,and agreements are some common problems faced by farmers. They are generally paid less than their share, With blockchain, agribusiness will become more transparent and that will enable shared control accessibility.

This industry needs to maintain customer trust in case of food quality, blockchain has the power to ensure transparency in the system.

How will this system work?

The blockchain system in agriculture is easy to understand.

Step1: Data Generation

The data will be generated by three major categories

Crop and soil monitoring: Temperature, pH level of soil,pesticides and water spray from IoT sensors and weather and wind monitoring data.

Warehousing and distribution: Quality control, tracking transportation and food safety control.

Retail and marketing: Bill data, taxes and compliance.

Step2: Data Processing

This data will be processed in form of smart contracts to keep the chain transparent to investors.

Step3: Blockchain Consumptions

This data will be hashed and saved on blockchains. Information on land usage, crop efficiency, financial audit and flood mitigation can be collected from these chains.

Summing Up

According to UN reports, food fraud costs the globally economy a sum of $40 billion per year because of illicit trade.Blockchain will help to keep tabs on abundant commodities and food frauds. With blockchain agribusiness, one can expect better harvesting and trade practices.