ADW: Blockchain-enabled Small-scale Farm Digitization

TL;DR

This paper introduces ADW, a blockchain-based system that digitizes small-scale farm records in real-time, enhancing transparency, trust, and data sharing across the agricultural ecosystem.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel blockchain-enabled platform, ADW, that automates and secures small-scale farm data collection and sharing using farm tractor instrumentation.

Findings

Successfully processed thousands of farm activity events

Demonstrated automated farm boundary detection across different regions

Enabled real-time, trusted farm record creation

Abstract

Farm records hold the static, temporal, and longitudinal details of the farms. For small-scale farming, the ability to accurately capture these records plays a critical role in formalizing and digitizing the agriculture industry. Reliable exchange of these record through a trusted platform could unlock critical and valuable insights to different stakeholders across the value chain in agriculture eco-system. Lately, there has been increasing attention on digitization of small scale farming with the objective of providing farm-level transparency, accountability, visibility, access to farm loans, etc. using these farm records. However, most solutions proposed so far have the shortcoming of providing detailed, reliable and trusted small-scale farm digitization information in real time. To address these challenges, we present a system, called Agribusiness Digital Wallet (ADW), which leverages blockchain to formalize the interactions and enable seamless data flow in small-scale farming ecosystem. Utilizing instrumentation of farm tractors, we demonstrate the ability to utilize farm activities to create trusted electronic field records (EFR) with automated valuable insights. Using ADW, we processed several thousands of small-scale farm-level activity events for which we also performed automated farm boundary detection of a number of farms in different geographies.