Smart Agriculture: An Open Field For Smart Contracts

Smart agriculture is increasingly becoming a paramount financial sector with important implications on a global scale. The real time weather and soil status monitoring as well as the desired higher food quality are major drivers behind this technological, ecological, and financial trend. This work explores the enticing prospect of combining IoT and smart contract technologies with smart agriculture in order to deliver not only higher quality agricultural products, but also improving the associated supply chain and agricultural logistics, thus resulting in multiple benefits for all the parties involved. Emphasis is placed on deriving similarity metrics for tuples describing soil and climate conditions based on numerical and possibly categorical data. Moreover, a sample implementation of one such metric is given in Solidity, a high level language for formulating smart contracts designed for the Ethereum Virtual Machine is also provided as a concrete example. Finally, aspects of agricultural asset digitization, a crucial step for smart contracts relying on physical objects are also discussed.