Hyperledger Fabric in Precision Agriculture: A Study on Data Integrity and Availability

The increasing severity of weather events and growing demands for food pose significant challenges to farming and agricultural activities. Over the past decades, the deployment of data acquisition and Internet of Things (IoT)-oriented technologies has emerged as a relevant solution to face these issues, with a primary reason behind this digital agricultural revolution being the cost-effectiveness of data collection in various areas (e.g., soil conditions, crop development, weather patterns). On the basis of these technological advancements, in this paper we discuss on a fully-distributed blockchain-based IoT-oriented agricultural monitoring system based on an integrated Hyperledger Fabric framework. The proposed platform is designed to maximize the efficiency of the approach, to analyze several potential benefits (including, as an example, possible increased food production on reduced land areas, with lower input requirements and a diminished environmental impact), and to effectively aggregate and interpret data into actionable insights for farmers and policymakers. We then propose a preliminary system's deployment, which is instrumental to reflect on platform's scalability, inclusiveness, and modularity. The obtained results highlight its suitability to enhance precision agriculture with secure tracking features.