Safe farming as a service of blockchain-based supply chain management for improved transparency

Precision agriculture is based on the idea of utilizing technology to improve the efficiency of agriculture industry. Blockchain technology has great potential to revolutionize the agricultural industry. Furthermore, various Internet of Things (IoT) based solutions are proposed to enhance production such as crops condition monitoring system. These technologies aim to address various stages of the agricultural supply chain by improving the processes. The key issue faced by farmers is to ensure the protection of their crops from animals during all stages of a harvest. This paper proposes a IoT-based prevention system to tackle this issue for safe farming. The solution is based on the input of the sensor nodes deployed in the field to detect animal attacks. These sensors report a hazard to a Repelling and Notifying System (RNS) in the field. The RNS produces human-safe ultrasonic sound waves that are unbearable for animals, thus they leave the field. The proposed RNS system also reports all hazard incidents to a centralized Farm Management System (FMS) maintained by the farmer. The paper also proposes a way the FMS can add value to a broader arena by becoming a service to an Agricultural Blockchain system. As a blockchain node, the FMS maintains a shared ledger as part of blockchain to share the details of incidents with meta information with other nodes in the blockchain. This information is vital for other blockchain nodes of the agricultural blockchain such as other FMS, companies, authorities and standard bodies. The low-cost RNS performance evaluation concludes that it is power efficient that makes it even affordable for developing countries, and as a Blockchain service it enables novel applications for the agriculture industry.