Agriculture contributes more than $992 billion to the United States’ GDP, making it one of the most essential industries in the world. With as many as 21.4 million jobs dependent on agriculture’s sustained success, the stakes are high for ensuring that farming remains viable and a competitive marketplace for all. Negotiating the changes in international trade policy and maintaining affordable labor as borders potentially tighten represent two of the newer challenges to agriculture going forward. But older, more persistent threats to the industry also remain, from grappling with decisions about which technology to embrace and when to bite the bullet and invest in those technologies. Commodity prices are far from consistent, and U.S. farmers were paid less than 90% of the market price in 2018, a figure that is once again trending downward.



See also: What is Blockchain application

Blockchain appeared in our lives as a modern technology that promises ubiquitous financial transactions among distributed untrusted parties, without the need of intermediaries such as banks. Several ongoing projects and initiatives now illustrate the impact blockchain technology is having on agriculture and suggest it has great potential for the future.


See also: What is Blockchain 1.0

Now, I introduce my research about 5 Potential Use Cases for Blockchain in Agriculture

Food Safety

This seems to be the area where the most work has already been done because there clear vested interest from both producer and consumer. IBM along with companies like Walmart have started leading the charge in this capacity. Bringing transparency to the supply chain will allow us to identify and remove bad actors and poor processes. This ensures ideal conditions from farm to market, and we can pinpoint source quickly in the event of a food safety outbreak. This could save time, money, and lives.

See also: What is Blockchain 3.0

Traceability

The benefit to buying local food is always described as “you know exactly where your food comes from and who grew it. You know it’s fresh”. What if we could make this happen at scale? Meaning, no matter where you bought your food, you knew not only where it came from, but when it was harvested and processed, and even who produced it.

Incentivizing Sustainable Practices

There are several common practices in agriculture that are unsustainable, yet persist. The global market for pesticides is worth more than $35 billion per year, and a distressing volume of those chemicals end up discharged into bodies of water that are used for drinking, cooking, and/or bathing. In large part due to unsustainable agriculture practices, a study by the UK Environment Agency found that over 95% of British rivers and 85% all waters in the UK would not pass even liberal standards of ecological quality.

The most common chemical found to contaminate groundwater is nitrate, a primary component in crop fertilizers. In addition to the harm being imposed upon critical water sources, an estimated 4 billion tons of soil are lost or destroyed as the result of raising crops each year, at an estimated economic cost of $27 billion per annum. It’s impossible to issue a good faith denial of the lasting damage agriculture-derived pollution is doing to the land and to the many native populations who ingest the remnants of unsustainable practices in the form of chemicals.

Logistics

Anyone who has worked in the agricultural supply chain knows the challenges that come with logistics. Dealing with products that often have a very short shelf life in uncertain conditions in high quantities with a lot of dollars on the line.

Opening New Markets

If we can create trust and accountability among market players, there is reduced need to evaluate each person individually on their trustworthiness and ability to execute. This means that market players that couldn’t establish trust before for any reason (they didn’t live close to each other, they didn’t have a protocol for if things fell apart, the time to develop a new relationship didn’t justify the value, etc.) now could do business without someone needing to broker trust (and take a margin) in the middle. This also means that disadvantaged market participants can have a sort of “seat at the table” through this technology.

Those are by no means the ONLY potential use cases for blockchain in agriculture. Just my opinion on four that seem to make sense.