**6.2 Fair pricing**

Farmers are the weak link in the agri-food production chain, the price they got for their products does not reflect their real provided efforts due to the existence of multiple middle layers of buyers. This issue happens because they lack marketing opportunities, thus their products are not properly marketed, so they do not get the deserved price from the buyers. Thanks to Blockchain technology, farmers can reach more buyers and marketplaces than expected and can fairly discuss the right price of their goods. A decentralized farming approach named KHET is proposed by Paul et al. [81] to slightly reduce this issue, KHET platform enables farmers, companies, and buyers to communicate with each other, and make commitments based on the smart contract without any intermediary. With such a platform, farmers can finance their farming projects without requesting a loan from the bank. **Figure 6** illustrates a proposed model of how can farmers make deals fairly with retailers using Blockchain technology. The farmer and the retailers must be registered in the public Blockchain system, each one is identified with a unique identifier, which is its digital wallet address. The deals are made on a dedicated agricultural platform which is channeled with the Blockchain system using a dedicated API, the role of the API is to retrieve and verify farmers' and retailers' addresses. The farmers are now able to check and discuss the prices of their

**Figure 6.** *A proposed model of agricultural fair pricing application based on Blockchain technology.*

*Digital Agriculture and Intelligent Farming Business Using Information and Communication… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.102400*

products freely and fairly with all interested stakeholders and without a middle-man. If the farmer and the retailer accept the conditions, the smart contract is established and the amount of money can also be transferred from the retailer's digital wallet to the farmer's digital wallet using the digital money platform.

#### **6.3 Oversight of agricultural subsidies**

To help farmers in their multiple investments and increase productivity, a new governmental subsidies distribution system should be adopted. The classical methods of distributing aids to farmers lack transparency due to information centralization and lack of coordination between agricultural stakeholders. With Blockchain, a decentralized ledger can be built to ensure agricultural information sharing in a secured manner. The digital ledger can be made publically available, thus farmers

**Figure 7.** *A proposed scenario of single farmer identity management using Blockchain in a multi-collaborators environment.*

can see if subsidies go it should be, as well as how much each farmer receives as aid. In this context, Abraham and Santosh Kumar [82] proposed a Blockchain-based system to ensure transparency and reliability of the information in the subsidies system. The scenario proposed in **Figure 7** provides a solution to deal with the problem of farmers' identity management in a multi-collaborators environment, each farmer is identified by a chain code which is a smart contract installed on the peers of the private system of the AD (Agricultural Department), each AD uses a certificate to authenticate the transaction in the public Blockchain system and keep a private validated ledger. When the farmer sends a transaction, it is accepted or refused depending on the rules and the policy described in the chain code. Agricultural departments are interfaced with the Blockchain system to share the information securely with each other using the unique identity of the farmer. When a transaction occurs between one or more AD, it must be validated by the transaction verification system, which is composed of the other agricultural collaborators. According to this scenario, farmers' information is transparent and reliable for all the agricultural collaborators, Thus, subsidies go to the one who deserves them.

#### **6.4 Contract farming improvement**

Smart contract occurs when it is self-managed without middle parties which increases automation and decentralization of the tamper-proof of data, Ethereum Blockchain [83] and Hyperledger Fabric represent an example of platforms that support this kind of technology. They allow developers to implement their Blockchain layer and applications, such as smart contracts, in a decentralized way. The Blockchainbased IF use case enables the final consumers and the partners to have full knowledge about the agricultural product that they want to buy or to retail. The integration of the smart contract with IoT by Umamaheswari et al. [84] helps to build trust between farmers and consumers by providing information about the origin and the environment in which the product is grown and stored, as well as the ability to track the transaction path. Moreover, the implementation of smart contract in the agricultural process improves the CIA (Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability) of data storing method and enable the public to get a trustable license based on the comparison between the products' stored information in the data private chain and those publically available [85]. Data sharing in the IF environment is one of the major challenges of the distributed and scalable IoT systems, this issue is managed by Ur Rahman et al. [86] through a data-sharing smart contract system with access control capability. The smart contract application is present in models proposed in **Figures 6-10**.

#### **6.5 Overseeing farm inventory**

Farmers work hard and wait for the post-harvest stage, it is difficult for a farmer to imagine any damage in quantity or quality of his produce. Massive quantities of agricultural products are wasted before it reaches the retailer. This big wastage can be avoided by monitoring some environmental parameters in the storage area. Humidity, temperature, and CO2 concentration are some variables that can be tracked using IoT and sensors. Public ledgers using Blockchain allow to share information about the product storage operation between all the chain stakeholders, so big visibility about the product's history is provided to all interested collaborators. Moreover, combining IoT and sensors to gather information about the inventory, and public ledgers to implement strategies to monitor this information can be a perfect way

*Digital Agriculture and Intelligent Farming Business Using Information and Communication… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.102400*

#### **Figure 8.**

*A proposed scenario of overseeing farm inventory using Blockchain.*

to manage inventories and logistics flows. Vendor-managed inventories (VMI) is a popular Blockchain-based collaborative inventory management policy, VMI might be founded on the smart contract between manufacturers, vendors, and buyers [87], consequently, each one of those collaborators can build its supply chain strategy and inventory policy management [88]. The proposed architecture in **Figure 8** illustrates a Blockchain-based system for product inventory management. Farming, manufacturing, and supply chain processes are authenticated using smart contracts and share the products' data in the Blockchain system publically available for consumers. All the transactions occurring between the consumer and the other stakeholders are managed and protected by the smart contract, the verified transaction are stored securely in the Blockchain. The consumer can check the information related to the products before ordering them, or track their safety on the farm, in the factory, or during the delivery process.

#### **6.6 Farming supply chain enhancement**

Demonstrating the quality of a product in a producer-consumer relationship is the critical weakness of community-supported agriculture [89]. Without transparency and mechanisms of tracking and monitoring in the production process, consumers are unsure about the safety of the goods they buy and receive. The traceability frameworks based on Blockchain technology in the supply chain is an important key feature not only to ensure the security of the on-chain or off-chain encrypted

*A proposed model of supply chain enhancement using Blockchain technology.*
