AGWS: Blockchain-enabled Small-scale Farm Digitization

Abstract

Farm records hold the static, temporal, and longitudinal details of the farms. For small-scale farming, the ability to accurately capture these records plays a critical role in formalizing and digitizing the agriculture industry. A trusted exchange of these records could unlock critical insights to different stakeholders across the value chain. Recently, there has been increasing attention on digitizing small scale farming with the goal of increasing farm-level transparency and visibility, access to credit, etc. using these farm records. However, most solutions proposed so far have the shortcoming of providing granular and trusted small-scale farm digitization. To address these challenges, we present a system, called AG-Wallet System(AGWS), which leverages blockchain to formalize the interactions and data flow in small-scale farming ecosystem. Utilizing instrumentation of farm tractors, we demonstrate the ability to utilize farm activities to create trusted electronic field records (EFR). Using AGWS, we processed over one hundred thousand small-scale farm-level activity events for which we also performed automated farm boundary detection of several farms.