Smart agriculture assurance: IoT and blockchain for trusted sustainable produce

Abstract

Current conventional agricultural practices have exacerbated the depletion of soil, loss of biodiversity, and intensified the substantial challenges of food security including monoculture dependence, resource intensiveness, access and distribution issues. This has raised consumers awareness towards monitoring the resources of their food consumption. Nevertheless, greenwashing and deceptive food labels are prevalent leading to sales of items with misaligned labels, underpinning the need to authenticate, trace, and track the agricultural supply chain from the farm to shop. Consumers should be able to select fresh produce and verify its origin through a transparent, trustworthy, accountable, and reliable process. This paper introduces a blockchain-based solution that leverages intrinsic features of this innovative and disruptive technology to harness transparency, reliability, authenticity, and accountability within an agricultural supply chain. Additionally, our solution eliminates misleading food labels on fresh produce by enabling consumers to reliably trace and verify the origin and authenticity of the food source in a transparent manner. Through the integration of the Internet of Things (IoT), the well-being of the soil, air, and crops is consistently monitored. The sustainable solutions employed are transparent, aligning with the standards set by various sustainable food certifications and agencies, including organic, non-Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO), and Good Agricultural Practices (GAP). The paper presents detailed algorithms that represent the smart contract code, sequence diagrams along with testing results and security analysis. The smart contract code is made publicly available on GitHub.