Blockchain for precision irrigation: Opportunities and challenges

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AbstractIn modern cities, smart irrigation systems are designed to operate via Internet of things (IoT) based sensor units having precise measurements of irrigation requirements such as amount of water, crop temperature, and humidity to build a robust supply chain ecosystem. The usage of sensors and networking units enable the optimal usage of irrigation resources, and is termed as precision irrigation (PI). Thus, PI leverage an efficient solution to handle the scarcity of essential resources such as food, water, land units, and crop yields. Thus, farmers gets better returns in the market due to high production. However, in PI, the exchange of crop readings from sensor units to actuators are processed through open channels, that is, Internet. Thus, it open the doors for malicious intruders to deploy network and sensor‐based attacks on PI‐sensors, to drain the available resources, and battery power of sensor nodes in the network. This reduces the optimum and precise utilization of irrigation resources, low‐yield crops and damaged crops in supply chain systems. This leads to dissatisfaction among agriculture stakeholders such as quality control units, logistics, suppliers, and customers. Motivated from the above discussions, the survey presents the advantages of integrating blockchain (BC) with PI to handle issues pertaining to security, trust, and transactional payments among agriculture stakeholders. The survey is directed to achieve threefold objective‐ attack models and countermeasures in PI systems, integration of BC in PI to mitigate attack models, and research challenges in deploying BC in PI. To address the first objective, the survey proposes an in‐depth comparative analysis of traditional irrigation systems with PI, with discussions on attack models. To address the second objective, the survey proposes an integration model of BC with PI to secure IoT sensors, and maintain trust and transparency among stakeholders. Finally, the survey addresses the open research challenges of deploying BC in PI‐based irrigation systems, and presents a case‐study of AgriChain as an industry ready‐solution that envisions BC with PI ecosystem. Thus, the proposed survey acts as a roadmap for agriculture industry stakeholders, researchers, to deploy BC in IoT‐based PI that leverages an efficient, robust, trust‐worthy, and secure ecosystem.