Innovative blockchain-based farming marketplace and smart contract performance evaluation

Abstract

E-Agriculture, or Smart Farming, refers to the design, development, and application of innovative methods to use modern information and communication technologies (ICTs), such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and machine learning, to move towards more sustainable agricultural and farming practices. The integration of blockchain technology in farming is gaining attention for its potential to migrate from the centralized and monopolistic model that shapes today’s food value chain. This paper highlights the fact that most of today’s blockchain-based farming frameworks focus on food tracking and traceability. Only rarely does research focus on the design of digital marketplaces to support the trading of agricultural goods between farmers and potentially interested third party stakeholders; equally rarely are performance evaluations performed for the proposed frameworks. The latter is where this paper contributes the most by, not only proposing a novel blockchain-based farming marketplace platform (called “FarMarketplace”), but also a comprehensive methodology to help software solution integrators to better understand and measure how a given configuration setting of such a platform can influence the overall quality of service performance in the long run.