Despite what the news may make us believe, blockchain has a vast range of applications beyond cryptocurrencies. The technology is set to radically transform a large number of industries, from healthcare to law, to real estate, to banking.

1. Blockchain in Agriculture- Improving
Agricultural Techniques

2. Agenda Layout
01
02
03
04
05
Crop and Food Production
Food Supply Chain
Controlling Weather Crisis
Managing Agricultural Finance
The Future of Blockchain in the Agriculture Industry

3. “Ensuring Efficiency, Trust and Transparency
from Farms to Groceries”
Despite what the news may make us believe, blockchain has a vast
range of applications beyond cryptocurrencies. The technology is set
to radically transform a large number of industries, from healthcare
to law, to real estate, to banking.
However, one little-explored industry that blockchain has the
potential to revolutionize completely is agriculture. It may not seem
as glamorous as banking or health care, but this massive industry
underpins our society. More importantly, it has a growing number of
issues that desperately need solving.

4. Crop and Food Production

5. Uses Cases of Blockchain in Agriculture:
1. Crop and Food Production:
• Catering the needs of the increasing population by growing more
food with minimal resources while reducing environmental
footprint, maximizing customer satisfaction, enabling transparency
across the supply chain and guaranteeing fair income to farmers
while handling the vagaries of the weather- the agriculture sector
has a lot of challenges to overcome while improving profitability
under unfavorable environmental conditions.
• From farmer to manufacturer and grocer, blockchain coupled with
IoT is remodeling the food production industry. The blockchain is
all set to make farming a sustainable practice by optimizing
farming resources including water, labor, and fertilizer using a
simplified approach.
• Let us explore how blockchain combined with IoT can facilitate
farmers and other stakeholders in taking optimum decisions.

6. Here is a detailed process of how blockchain can transform
the way crops or food items are produced:
• The population across the globe is expected to touch
9.6 billion by 2050 and therefore, to feed the
increasing population, the farming industry is
adopting IoT devices and sensors. In IoT-enabled
smart farming, a system is built for keeping an eye
on the crop field using sensors (temperature, pH, soil
moisture, humidity, light).
• IoT sensors and devices generate data which can
help farmers make well-informed decisions related to
the growth of the crops. The information gathered
from the IoT devices first need to be structured
before getting saved on the data storage.
Step1: IoT devices generating data

7. Here is a detailed process of how blockchain can transform
the way crops or food items are produced:
• Before saving the collected data on the blockchain, there is a need to ensure that it
is structured and understandable.
• Data Enrichment is done to add more value to improve the quality of the captured
information. The following two steps ensure that the data is cleaned before it gets
stored on the distributed storage platform:
Step2: Cleaning and Enrichment of the collected data
• Information related to timestamp, demography, and type should be added to the data
for making it more structured.
Adding Meta Information
• Saving data on the blockchain does not mean that it should not be compliant.
Instead, it makes compliance enforcement more seamless.
Meeting compliance ensures that the personally identifiable information associated
with the data collected from IoT devices is protected and follows security measures.
• Once the data is enriched, it is put into the machine learning-ready format.
Making data ready for compliance

8. Here is a detailed process of how blockchain can transform
the way crops or food items are produced:
• Machine Learning is applied to the data generated from the sensors
to provide useful insights. Predictive models can drive several high-
value use-cases including:
• Crop Quality Recommendations
• Crop Identification
• Crop Yield Prediction
• GrowScore (Automated crop growth factor)
• Crop Demand Prediction
• From the information captured through machine learning
algorithms, farmers and other stakeholders will be able to make
improvements in the irrigation system from time to time.
• The insightful data should be stored on the blockchain to enable
agriculture market participants such as growers, innovators,
producers, service providers and retailers to access it transparently.
Step3: Making the data more insightful with
machine learning algorithms

9. Here is a detailed process of how blockchain can transform
the way crops or food items are produced:
• The high-value data gathered by applying machine learning gets
stored in IPFS (Interplanetary File System), a distributed storage
platform having addresses hashed and stored on the blockchain.
• Unlike the existing method to store essential information in the
centralized server which has a risk of single point of failure, the data
is distributed across every node in the network preventing a central
authority to control the system.
• The information captured in the blockchain will trigger smart
contracts to process rules defined within them.
• Smart contracts facilitate the exchange of data stored on the
blockchain within the specific stakeholders in the system.
• Since information will be visible to every agriculture market
participant, it will become seamless for them to bring efficiency in
crop or food production.
Step4: Data gets saved on the blockchain

10. Food Supply Chain

11. 2. Food Supply Chain:
Food Supply Chain tracking is critical to exploring the source from where the food has
originated or grown. It is essential to ensure that the supplied eatables are safe to eat.
But when it comes to the way the food supply chain is managed currently, it becomes
challenging for the food producers and retailers to confirm the provenance of the
products. While facing the constant threat from adulteration, food frauds cost UK
families upto £1.17 billion per year.
With the emergence of the blockchain, it has become possible to bring trust and
transparency in the food supply chain ecosystem, ensuring food safety for everyone.
Read further to discover how.

12. Here is an in-depth explanation of how the food supply
chain blockchain can reduce food frauds:
• As discussed in the above use-case, smart farming
allows sensors to generate crucial information
related to the crops sown in the fields.
• If the farmer is not using technology-driven methods,
then they can simply store the essential information
such as crop quality, type of seed and weather
conditions under which the crops were sown using
their mobile application.
• The data captured either by using IoT sensors or
manually by farmers is saved in the distributed
storage platform, i.e., IPFS with addresses stored in
the blockchain.
Step1: IoT sensors generating data or
Farmers storing data

13. Here is an in-depth explanation of how the food supply
chain blockchain can reduce food frauds:
• Once the crops are grown up, the food processing companies
start bidding on the bidding platform.
• The crops can be transported to the refineries via IoT-enabled
vehicles, capturing temperature conditions under which the
items are kept and delivered.
• After the bid is validated through smart contracts, the crops
undergo processing and companies store information captured
at every step of the process on the blockchain.
• The information gathered from refineries can help wholesalers
or retailers to confirm if the delivered food is of good quality or
not.
• Storing data on the blockchain can also ensure if the
compliance has been met at every step of the food supply
chain.
Step2: Distribution of grown-up crops to the
food processing companies

14. Here is an in-depth explanation of how the food supply
chain blockchain can reduce food frauds:
• After the food items or crops are processed,
wholesalers and retailers can bid for the products
they want through the bidding platform. Similar to
the transportation of crops to the refineries, the
food items are also distributed to wholesalers and
retailers in IoT-enabled vehicles.
• Blockchain offers traceability in the supply chain,
helping food companies conducting food recalls
or investigations quickly and seamlessly.
Step3: Supply of Processed Food to
Wholesalers and Retailers

15. Here is an in-depth explanation of how the food supply
chain blockchain can reduce food frauds:
• From farm origination details to transportation details, batch
numbers, food processing and factory data, expiration details,
storage temperature and other details digitally linked to the
food items within the blockchain, consumers can explore
everything by back tracing the supply chain.
• The food supply chain based on the blockchain can help
different stakeholders to access information related to the
food’s quality at every stage.
• As blockchain brings transparency in the food supply chain
ecosystem, it will be easier to figure out when and how food
has been contaminated.
• Let’s have a look at the architecture for real-time bidding
platform built on the blockchain which will enable all
stakeholders to bid for the crops and processed food items.
Step4: Consumers can backtrace the supply
chain

16. Here is an in-depth explanation of how the food supply
chain blockchain can reduce food frauds:

17. Here is an in-depth explanation of how the food supply
chain blockchain can reduce food frauds:
The architecture comprises the systems required to set bidding
parameters, create campaigns, serve ads, place the bids, analyze the
success of the campaign and store the results.
The application for campaign management including features like
dashboards and reporting are hosted on Google App Engine. The
campaign information uploaded by the different users of the system is
stored in the blockchain ledger.
When any of the stakeholders access content on the web using PC or
other devices, an ad placement request is triggered via Double-click or Ad
exchange. The load balancer gets the bid request and forwards it to the
Bid Server where tables are matched to examine what bid to return.

18. Here is an in-depth explanation of how the food supply
chain blockchain can reduce food frauds:
The ads can be fetched and stored directly from the Blockchain. Pixel
Servers running on the top of Google Compute Engine fulfill the ads
requests. Modeling and Analytics run on the ads and campaign
results via a wide range of methods. BigQueryis used for querying
and loading data to explore the campaign’s effectiveness.
On the other hand, the prediction API is used for implementing
machine learning algorithms to the history of bidding results for
improving the campaigns.

19. Controlling Weather Crisis

20. 3. Controlling Weather Crisis:
Farmers usually have to confront
unpredictable weather conditions
while growing different types of crops.
Therefore, predicting and monitoring
weather conditions are essential to
the crop survival.
Many of the crops grown in the US
cannot tolerate flooding due to
excessive spring rains. The oxygen
concentration level reaches zero,
making it difficult for the plants to
perform life-sustaining functions like
water uptake, root growth and
respiration.

21. 3. Controlling Weather Crisis:
Moreover, the lack of
transparency in the current food
chain ecosystems can result in
unclear and high surge pricing.
Consumers don’t have an idea
when did the crops suffer lousy
weather conditions and what led
to the increased costs.
Due to the ability of blockchain
to offer traceability and
transparency, farmers and other
stakeholders will be able to get
a clear understanding of the
price differences in the food
distribution market.
Since authorized parties can
trace the weather conditions
from the blockchain ledger,
farmers can quickly get the crop
insurance claims through smart
contracts.
Let’s explore how blockchain
can help control bad weather
situations.

22. A step-by-step Blockchain-enabled Weather Control Process
for Agricultural Fields
• Smart agriculture enables farmers to understand the crop’s
behavior by deploying sensors and mapping fields. Placing
agricultural weather stations within the farms can help
generate crucial information such as soil temperature at
different heights, air temperature, leaf wetness, rainfall, wind
speed, dew point temperature, relative humidity, solar
radiation, wind direction and atmospheric pressure.
• All of the above parameters are measured, recorded and
saved in the blockchain enabling farmers and other authorized
entities to access it transparently.
Step1: Agricultural Weather Stations sending
essential information to the blockchain

23. A step-by-step Blockchain-enabled Weather Control Process
for Agricultural Fields
• By analyzing the data generated by the weather
station, farmers will be able to make informed
decisions related to the farming.
• For example, if they figure out that it may rain heavily
in the next two days, it will help them to take
necessary actions in advance.
Step2: Farmers can take preventive
actions

24. A step-by-step Blockchain-enabled Weather Control Process
for Agricultural Fields
• In case of the damage during a weather crisis, farmers can
quickly apply for the crop insurance claim amount through the
blockchain.
• The transparent and immutable behavior of the blockchain will
enable insurance companies and other authorized parties to
access the data captured by the smart weather station easily.
• They can directly query the blockchain to fetch the required
information with the help of smart contracts. After the
insurance claim request is approved, farmers will automatically
get the requested amount in their respective wallets.
• Therefore, a blockchain-enabled solution can help farmers get
the compensation seamlessly and quickly.
Step3: Quick application for the crop
insurance

25. Managing Agricultural Finance

26. 4. Managing Agricultural Finance
Lack of transparency, credit histories and difficulties in the contract enforcement are
some of the myriad problems confronting between formal financial inclusion and
smallholders.
The inability to access financial services can have an adverse impact on the
performance of agricultural value chains due to which producers cannot maximize
their yields and buyers face struggles ensuring an efficient supply of commodities.
The financial services do not only enable smallholders to invest in the agriculture, but
also assist them in relieving liquidity constraints. It results in the difficulty for buyers to
pay farmers on delivery, forcing poor smallholders to sell crops at the lower rates.
Blockchain brings the fairness in the process of agricultural finance via transparency
and shared control accessibility.

27. Here’s how blockchain could help in managing agricultural
finance
• Every time a transaction will take place, it will be stored
in the blockchain, enabling all the involved parties to
access every single transaction transparently.
• Sharing essential information at every step of the food
production will bring more fairness to the entire system.
Step1: Stakeholders sharing information
at every step of food production

28. Here’s how blockchain could help in managing agricultural
finance
• Having the ability to store information permanently and
securely, the blockchain can also serve as a source of
verification for the recorded transactions.
• Instead of asking farmers or retailers to send financial
reports for auditing purposes, the auditors will be able to
verify the transactions directly via blockchain ledgers.
• The automated auditing process can make the audit
environment cost-effective. Rather than carrying out
assessments at the end of the year, audit firms will be in a
position to conduct audits throughout the period.
• Blockchain will make it possible to replace the random
auditing by auditors, making it more effective to access
every single transaction.
Step2: Auditors can effectively conduct
audits

29. Here are the benefits of implementing the Blockchain in
Agriculture
1. Improved Quality Control and Food Safety
• One of the significant applications of blockchain is bringing increased transparency to
the supply chain. It can help us to remove ineffective processes and ensure optimal
quality control conditions.
• For instance, crop failure is a prevalent issue faced by farmers around the globe. It
usually happens because of unfavorable climatic conditions, such as poorly distributed
rainfall and erratic weather.
• To solve this, companies like IBM are already investing millions into precision
agriculture, creating IoT devices that allow farmers to monitor factors such as the soil
quality, pests, and irrigation that could affect their crops.
• By connecting these devices to a blockchain ledger, the results can be updated
continuously and viewed in real time by just looking at an application on their phone. It
will allow them to check that all factors are as they should be. If something is wrong,
they will be notified immediately and can make adjustments before it is too late.
• Even more importantly, in the case of problems such as a food safety outbreak, it also
gives us the ability to find the source of the issue almost immediately. This has the
potential to save more than just time and money in the supply chain process—it could
even save lives.

30. Here are the benefits of implementing the Blockchain in
Agriculture
2. Increased Traceability in the Supply Chain
• We’re witnessing a dramatic rise in consumer expectations for food standards. Most notably,
more and more consumers want to know where their food comes from.
• Using blockchain technology will solve this problem by letting consumers know exactly where
their food originated, who planted it, and how fresh it is. It will only require workers to scan the
product at each stage in the process to update the database with information.
• Just imagine buying something from the store and being able to find out absolutely everything
about the product by just scanning the barcode with your smartphone app.
• Increasing the traceability of the supply chain will have a considerable impact in reducing food
fraud, false labeling, and cutting intermediaries out of the process to ensure producers get paid
fairly for their efforts and that consumers know exactly what they’re paying for.
• Increased traceability will also help farmers by allowing them to record and update the status of
their crops and track them through the process of planting, harvesting, storage, and delivery by
simply using an app on their smartphone so they can see the exact status of their products at all
times and make adjustments if necessary.
• Considering that roughly one-third of the food produced for human consumption—that’s
approximately 1.3 billion tons—every year is wasted, this innovation is long overdue. In
Australia, some farmers are already utilizing blockchain to track their production and reduce
waste.

31. Here are the benefits of implementing the Blockchain in
Agriculture
3. Increased Efficiency for Farmers
• Currently, most farmers use a combination of multiple software apps, spreadsheets, and
notes to record their data and manage their processes. However, this is complicated
and requires a lot of effort to send this data to other service providers.
• Blockchain technology would allow farmers to store all of their data in one place so that
it can easily be accessed by those who need it, simplifying the entire process and
saving valuable time and energy.
• For instance, they’d be able to keep track of things such as:
• Their business goals, and how they plan to reach these goals.
• The number of animals, health issues with animals, what they eat, and how often they
should be fed.
• How many different crop varieties are there, when they were planted, and how they are
performing.
• Their employee schedule, how much each employee needs to be paid, and how many
hours each employee has worked.
• Income and expenses.
• Keeping track of everything on a single application instead of having a variety of
different methods clarifies the process and diminishes the chance of valuable
information getting lost.

32. Here are the benefits of implementing the Blockchain in
Agriculture
4. Fairer Payment for Farmers
• There are currently several problems that make it difficult for farmers to get paid for their
produce.
• First of all, it often takes weeks for farmers to receive the full payment for their goods.
• To make matters worse, traditional payment mechanisms—usually wire transfers—often
take a significant chunk of the farmers’ earnings.
• Blockchain-based smart contracts work by triggering payments automatically as soon as
a specific, previously-specified condition has been fulfilled by the buyer—and without
charging extortionate transaction fees.
• It means that the farmer could theoretically receive payment for their goods as soon as
they have been delivered, without a significant portion of their income being taken away
from them in the process.
• Also, many farmers experience difficulty when they try to sell their products in the
market at a fair price. Right now, the intermediaries enjoy most of the profits, while doing
a minimal amount of work in comparison.
• Smart contracts would completely eradicate the need for these middlemen, as it would
allow farmers to connect directly with retailers. Therefore, they’d be able to receive a
fairer price for their goods.

33. The Future of Blockchain in the
Agriculture Industry

34. The Future of Blockchain in the Agriculture Industry
The blockchain is still a very recent technology, so there’s a long way to
go before its full set of applications can be developed and put into
practice.
However, it’s becoming increasingly clear that there are opportunities in
the agriculture industry. The global agriculture industry is now worth over
2.4 trillion dollars and has over one billion people involved
worldwide. Now, more than ever, there is an opportunity for innovation.
Contact our team of Blockchain Experts to get a better understanding of
the blockchain implementation in agriculture industry.

35. Blockchain in Agriculture- Improving
Agricultural Techniques
Thank you…