AgroBLF: blockchain-based framework for smart agriculture

Abstract

Agriculture in developing countries faces numerous challenges such as price fluctuation and non-uniformity, presence of untrusted middlemen in the supply chain, crop wastage due to inadequate storage facilities or long commutes, and lack of proper monitoring. Blockchain technology has emerged as a promising approach to solve these challenges. Even though a number of solutions are recently proposed in the literature, they lack in several aspects: (1) lack of proper regulatory interface, (2) absence of proper agricultural supply chain, (3) absence of adequate storage facilities, (4) absence of a fair payment system, (5) poor monitoring and auditing system, (6) non-inclusion of government policies, and (7) missing experimental validation. This paper presents a novel blockchain-based smart agriculture system that overcomes the above-mentioned issues. In particular, our solution covers product traceability in the supply chain, elimination of counterfeit products, easily accessible cold storage facilities, fair payment procedure between buyers and sellers, a transparent process of distributing government financial benefits to farmers, and overall government monitoring. We present a prototype implementation of our proposed system using Ethereum. The backend smart contracts are developed using Solidity programming language, whereas the frontend is developed using ReactJS. The experimental evaluation using Hyperledger Caliper benchmark tool shows an encouraging result, demonstrating the system performance in terms of execution gas costs, CPU utilization, average latency, and transaction throughput.