Electronic agriculture, blockchain and digital agricultural democratization: Origin, theory and application

Abstract

Agriculture is a key component of prosperous continuation of human civilization, meeting the basic needs of daily life. Democratization is an inevitable change in the development of political systems. Democratization as a general-purpose technological concept has given birth to a series of individual democratizations such as industrial democratization and financial democratization. Agricultural democratization is generally considered to bring freedom of information, improve agricultural production efficiency and, ultimately, form an open society, though this aspect of democratization is less studied than others.With the progress of science and technology, the practical application of information communication technology and blockchain technology in agriculture gives deeper digital significance to agricultural democratization, thus, further deriving the concept of “digital agricultural democratization”. This paper analyzes summarizes existing concepts, and analyzes the connotations and logical relationships between institutional concepts and technical concepts, such as agricultural democratization, agricultural autocratization, centralization, decentralization, information and communication technology, and blockchain, and proves that democratization and blockchain are general-purpose technologies which have “pervasiveness”. To realize the coupled nature of technical logic and institutional logic, we here define the concept of “digital agricultural democratization” which contains three important characteristics. To demonstrate this, we took the Beijing Liuminying Ecological Farm as a case study and proposed a “blockchain-based electronic agriculture” framework for its development and challenges. This framework incorporates the entire circular agricultural model of the ecological farm into the blockchain. The blockchain network automatically collects and uploads data through various types of smart devices, which expands the information set that can be used for sharing. This can solve problems such as asymmetric information, unreliable third-party institutions, and poor traceability of organic food. The innovation of the farm’s agricultural model provides a powerful example of a novel concept, and illustrates a reliable path for achieving “digital agricultural democratization”.