Abstract
Blockchain technology, while still challenged with key limitations, is a transformative Information and Communications Technology (ICT) that has changed our notion of trust. Improved efficiencies for agricultural sustainable development has been demonstrated when ICT-enabled farms have access to knowledge banks and other digital resources. UN FAO-recommended ICT e-agricultural infrastructure components are a confluence of ICT and blockchain technology requirements. When ICT e-agricultural systems with blockchain infrastructure are immutable and distributed ledger systems for record management, baseline agricultural environmental data integrity is safeguarded for those who participate in transparent data management. This paper reviewed blockchain-based concepts associated with ICT-based technology. Moreover, a model ICT e-agriculture system with a blockchain infrastructure is proposed for use at the local and regional scale. To determine context specific technical and social requirements of blockchain technology for ICT e-agriculture systems, an evaluation tool is presented. The proposed system and tool can be evaluated and applied to further developments of e-agriculture systems.
Highlights
Cautionary article for businesses considering embarking on an infrastructure transformation, Figure 3 is a proposed tool that can be used by experts to determine if there is a need for blockchain technology in spite of its limitations and with respect to agricultural environmental data management
Experts can quickly make a dual assessment such that if a need for a bridging mechanism of potential gaps in IT infrastructure exist, blockchain technology is recommended as an enabling environment for Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in agriculture
If gaps in knowledge flows among cross-sectoral stakeholders exist and potential systemic-wide bias and/or opaqueness in national processes and agricultural environmental data management persist, blockchain technology is recommended
Summary
Information and Communications Technology (ICT) is a precision agriculture technology [1]. By distributing database management among a greater number of actors, and making system wide data manipulation more difficult, baseline agricultural environmental data integrity is maintained–safeguarded from the biases or the fraudulent activity of any individual group of farmers, NGOs, stakeholders, consumers, and decision makers [17,18,19]. Agricultural and environmental monitoring data stored in a distributed cloud allows us to engineer trust and secure sustainable agricultural development with transparent data and ICT. In this way, blockchain technology is the foundation for democratized, automatic, and transparent data management [18]. This immutability may revolutionize the way all biophysical resources are recorded and traced from source, to use, to reuse in large scale datasets [23], and may ensure government record and service integrity [24]
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