Blockchain Based Provenance for Agricultural Products: A Distributed Platform with Duplicated and Shared Bookkeeping

The provenance (tracing) system of agricultural products is important for ensuring food safety. However, the stakeholders (growers, farmers, sellers etc.) are numerous and physically dispersed, making it difficult to manage data and information with a centralized approach. As a result, the production procedure remains non-transparent and trust is hard to build. In this paper, we propose an agricultural provenance system based on techniques of blockchain, which is featured by decentralization, collective maintenance, consensus trust and reliable data, in order to solve the trust crisis in product supply chain. Recorded information includes the management operations (fertilizing, irrigation, etc.) with certain data structure. Applying blockchain techniques to the provenance of agricultural product not only widens the application domain of blockchain, but also supports building a reliable community among different stakeholders around agriculture production.