Shetigram - Building a Digital Bridge Between Farmers and Consumers

Abstract

Transparency, cutting out middlemen, and fair trade have become essential focuses in agriculture. This paper proposes an innovative e-commerce platform that facilitates direct trans- actions between farmers and end-consumers using Ethereum blockchain smart contracts, leveraging the Elliptic Curve Dig- ital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) for secure and transparent transactions. ECDSA enhances security by providing robust authentication, ensuring that all transactions are irrefutable and trustworthy. The platform has a hybrid recommendation system, which uses the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) algorithm for delivering personalized product recommendations that fit each customer's personalized settings. This enables the software to work on natural language processing and this technique captures subtle feelings and contexts, thereby enhancing recommendation accuracy and diversification. Besides ARIMA, XGBoost algorithm, one of the machine learning methods, is applied to predict agricultural commodity prices and the demand, in this way by considering the internal, external, and seasonal factors that can create credit for each commodity provides much more accurate predictions and decision-making insights. XGBoost is a non-linear algorithm that wins in the comparison of MAE, RMSE, and MAPE as it continued to improve by capturing more factors and patterns associated with changes in the models. The platform aims to solve the problem of farmers being disadvantaged due to the lack of access to smartphones and internet connectivity. It will be done by integration of USSD-based interface that enables wide participation with basic mobile devices.