Blockchain in Big Data for Agriculture Supply Chain

With the increasing prominence of food safety problems, consumers are paying more and more attention to the quality and safety of agricultural products. Information traceability of agricultural products supply chain is an important way to ensure the quality and safety of agricultural products. Blockchain technology provides a new solution for information traceability of agricultural products supply chain with its characteristics of decentralization, immutable and transparency. This paper reviews the basic principles of blockchain technology and its application in agricultural supply chain information traceability. By combing relevant literature, it is found that blockchain technology is widely used in the production, processing, logistics and other aspects of agricultural products, effectively improving the transparency and traceability of the supply chain. Finally, it is concluded that the information traceability of agricultural product supply chain under the blockchain improves the traceability, visibility and information security of the supply chain, and also promotes the cooperation and coordination among various entities in the supply chain. With the continuous development and improvement of blockchain technology, its application in agricultural product supply chain information traceability will be more extensive and in-depth, providing more solid technical support for the quality and safety of agricultural products.

The study explores the transformative role of blockchain technology in enhancing transparency and traceability within the agricultural food supply chain. By leveraging blockchain's inherent characteristics of decentralization, immutability, and security, stakeholders can significantly improve information sharing and visibility from farm to consumer. The study delves into how blockchain addresses longstanding transparency and traceability issues that have plagued the agricultural sector. Real-world examples illustrate blockchain's successful application in agriculture, showcasing its capacity to boost transparency, operational efficiency, and trust among supply chain participants. These case studies demonstrate how blockchain creates tamper-proof records, enhances end-to-end visibility, and provides reliable, real time data. The technology's potential to combat fraud, promote sustainability, and ensure product authenticity is also explored. Furthermore, the research investigates blockchain's impact on food safety, particularly when integrated with Internet of Things (IoT) devices and smart contracts. These synergies enable automated, secure data collection and the execution of predefined agreements, further streamlining supply chain processes. Successful implementations across various areas of supply chain management, including logistics, inventory tracking, and quality control, are highlighted to demonstrate the practical benefits of blockchain adoption. By providing an in-depth analysis of blockchain's potential, this study underscores its pivotal role in building consumer trust regarding food safety, quality, and origin. The research concludes by discussing the challenges and opportunities for widespread blockchain adoption in agriculture, offering insights into its future trajectory and potential to revolutionize the global food supply chain.

Blockchain-enabled traceability has been widely touted as having a great potential for improving food supply chains. Proposed benefits include: outbreak tracing, verifying ingredient origins, monitoring environmental compliance and automating payments. Blockchain-enabled food supply chains have not been widely studied in developing countries. Therefore, a comprehensive evaluation of blockchain-enabled traceability in food supply chains was conducted to gain a deeper understanding of the potential impacts on food supply chain sustainability. A case study of a pork supply chain in Vietnam was analysed to understand the context in a developing country. The analysis was conducted through the lens of a triple-bottom-line blockchain framework for supply chains.KeywordsBlockchain traceabilityBlockchain technologyFood supply chainTriple-bottom line

PurposeThis paper aims to address the conceptual and practical challenges in integrating triple bottom line (TBL) sustainability in the agriculture supply chain (ASC). It identifies the key enablers for each of the three dimensions of TBL sustainability, analyses their causal relationships as well as cross-dimensional interactions under each TBL dimension. Further, it develops a decision support framework (DSF) for the assessment of TBL sustainability practices and policies in ASC and validates it through a case study.Design/methodology/approachAn interpretive structure modelling (ISM) methodology is deployed to establish the interrelationships among all TBL enablers and to identify the enablers with high driving power on sustainable ASC. Brainstorming by a group of experts was used to identify the relevant enables. Finally, a DSF was developed as a resultant of ISM.FindingsThe paper provides a set of enablers with high driving power that can significantly influence the sustainability practices and policies in ASC. The social enablers directly help to enhance the effect of economic enablers and collectively these enhance the effect of environmental enablers. If agriculture firms and supply chains design innovative policies and develop practices based on these enablers, they can achieve sustainable ASC. Consequently, the living standards of the people directly or indirectly associated with the agriculture firm or supply chain can be improved without compromising on economic performance.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper consolidates the fragmented knowledge of sustainable supply chain management in the agriculture sector and suggests a DSF to policymakers, managers and practitioners for assessing TBL sustainability practices and policies. The DSF has wide applicability in other sectors of production and operations management as these sectors also face the challenge of achieving TBL sustainability across their supply chain.Practical implicationsThe DSF, developed in the paper, is a useful tool for practitioners to frame and analyse sustainability initiatives and policies for ASC. A firm or supply chain may achieve TBL sustainability if it succeeds in uplifting the social status of its stakeholders.Social implicationsIt is a first step towards addressing the practical challenge of integrating sustainability in the agriculture sector of emerging economies and provides a path to improve the livelihood of people in the agriculture sector. Stakeholder engagement with a focus on collaboration and awareness may lead to the desired social and environmental consequences. Potential adverse social effects also need to be considered.Originality/valueThis paper focusses on the so far rather neglected but essential aspect of integrating TBL sustainability in the agriculture sector of emerging economies. The hierarchal representation and classification of the TBL sustainability enablers of sustainability is a unique effort in the field of ASC. Development of DSF is one of the first attempts to create a mapping between various enablers of TBL sustainability. The novelty of the study lies in the sector-specific, holistic evaluation of TBL sustainability policy measures that may lead to improvements in practice.

Given the state of technical advancement in modern society, blockchain technology has obvious potential in improving the transparency and efficiency of agricultural product supply chains. However, its high cost greatly influence enterprise strategy choices and adoption. Additionally, the agricultural supply chain faces several challenges, including asymmetric information, difficulties in traceability, complicated circulation links and high cost. This study explores how the deployment cost of blockchain affects the strategic choice of enterprises and to build a basic theoretical analysis framework. Also, the study analyzes the dynamic impact of blockchain technology cost on the strategic choices of agricultural supply chain by studying the case of Carrefour agricultural supply chain. The research concludes that the cost structure of blockchain technology directly drives enterprises to adopt the gradual strategy of "pilot expansion ecology". With the promotion of strategy, enterprises further mitigate the technology cost through large-scale application and ecological synergy, forming a positive cycle of "technology investment strategy upgrade cost optimization larger-scale investment".

One year into the largest economic and health event of the past 70 years, this paper considers how agricultural supply chains and agricultural transportation have been impacted by the COVID‐19 pandemic. Written as an update to Gray (2020), we are able to show that agricultural transportation systems have proven to be extremely robust and were able to innovate in real‐time to address challenges in the agricultural and food supply chains. We are also able confirm that most of the transportation components are well‐equipped to deal with the remainder of the pandemic and the recovery phase. Notably, innovation created new services, cost‐saving technologies, safety innovations, new institutions, networks, and channels of communication that operated effectively to address the pandemic. These changes are likely to remain in place post pandemic.

This study aims to evaluate the efficiency of agricultural supply chain using data envelopment analysis (DEA) model. This is because the supply chain of agricultural products is not regular and contains various members, which has been a limitation for analysis, but to overcome this, this study aims to systematically analyze it using the data envelopment analysis (DEA) model. The purpose of this study is to identify factors that hinder the development of the agricultural supply chain and propose strategies to improve the efficiency of the system. This study aims to verify the effectiveness of the analysis of China's agricultural supply chain, identify the main areas of inefficiency, and derive practical measures to optimize the supply chain system. This study provides implications for global agricultural supply chain cooperation between the Korean agricultural market and the Chinese agricultural market, which still has inefficiency factors, and for Korean companies to enter the Chinese agricultural supply chain market.

Despite the fact that the modern economy relies heavily on industrialization, Bangladesh's agricultural sector continues to be the country's primary source of revenue. Agriculture in Bangladesh has traditionally served as a driver of the country's sustained economic growth and development, and this trend will likely continue in the foreseeable future. However, the contribution of agriculture to the growth of non-agricultural sectors has maintained an increasing trend over time in Bangladesh, despite the large drop in the proportion of GDP attributable to agriculture over time. As a result, the agricultural sector continues to serve as an indispensable engine for the expansion of the country's economy. However, the process of agriculture's supply chain is notoriously difficult to understand. The connection between the consumer and the farmer is made by intermediaries. The accessibility of the market, the sort of product being sold, and other factors all have a role in determining the total number of intermediaries in the supply chain. Studies that were done in the past on the food supply chain in Bangladesh claim that there are a large number of intermediaries involved, and that these intermediaries skim off a significant amount of the price paid by customers as profit. Within the primary distribution channel, there are five different kinds of middlemen. Faria, Beparies, and Arathdar are the three primary mediators in this situation. Faria acted as a middleman for a number of small traders who operated their businesses inside three or four local markets. They were only responsible for a relatively little volume of product. Beparies are professional buyers who purchase agricultural goods from farmers or farias at the neighborhood market or in the community itself. Arathedar are agents who act between bepari and retailers and charge a fixed commission for the service of supplying storage space. They are considered to have a fixed establishment and serve as fixed commission agents. The agricultural supply chain in Bangladesh is significantly bolstered by the presence of these middlemen. The majority of Bangladesh's vegetable farmers do not have a formal education. They have a little understanding of how to offer their vegetable goods to the general public. Therefore, Faria, Beparies, and Arathdar are the means by which they market their product. At the intermediate level, the most significant aspects of marketing functions include transportation, storage, grading, financing, market intelligence, pricing, and other similar aspects are handled by the intermediaries.

Agriculture and allied activities hold a key to sustaining all human activities and ensuring a food-secured future. However, significant issues such as the ever-growing population and cut-throat competition for resources pose a continuous threat to the agricultural supply chains, thereby compromising sustainable agricultural development. To overcome the ever-escalating complex challenges in agricultural supply chains and production systems, advancements in precision agriculture, smart farming, and effective supply chain collaboration are critical for addressing agricultural sustainability challenges. This research study examines the direct effects of industry 4.0 technology capabilities (I4TC) and supply chain integration (SCI) on sustainable agricultural supply chain performance (SASCP). The study investigates the direct and indirect impact of I4TC on SASCP with SCI as the mediating variable; moreover, it seeks to validate the direct influence of I4TC on SCI and SASCP. Based on the data collected from 262 food processing organizations in India, the findings highlight noteworthy impacts of I4TC on SASCP and verify the presence of SCI as a partially mediating variable. Furthermore, the findings extend the body of knowledge on I4TC by recognizing I4TC as an enabler of SCI, thereby leading to enhanced SASCP. From the practitioner's perspective, the current study can help food-processing organizations better understand the importance of SCI in ASCs and provide valuable insights for managing ASCs to achieve SASCP.

The complexity of a supply chain makes product safety or quality issues extremely difficult to track, especially for the basic agricultural food supply chains of people's daily diets. The existing agricultural food supply chains present several major problems, such as numerous participants, inconvenient communication caused by long supply chain cycles, data distrust between participants and the centralized system. The emergence of blockchain technology effectively solves the pain-point problem existing in the traceability system of agricultural food supply chains. This paper proposes a framework based on the consortium and smart contracts to track and trace the workflow of agricultural food supply chains, implement traceability and shareability of supply chains, and break down the information islands between enterprises as much as possible to eliminate the need for the central institutions and agencies and improve the integrity of the transaction records, reliability and security. At the same time, farmers record details of the environment and crop growth data in the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and store file IPFS hashes in smart contracts, which not only increases data security but also alleviates the blockchain storage explosion problem. This framework has been applied in Shanwei Lvfengyuan Modern Agricultural Development Co., Ltd. Although there are still many defects, the framework has successfully realized functions such as disintermediation and tracing of agricultural product information through QR codes. Thus, the framework proposed in this paper is of great significance and reference value for enterprises to ensure product quality and safety traceability.

PurposeThis article sheds light on the missing links concerning the study of using integrated enabling technologies toward sustainable and circular agriculture supply chains by examining the available literature and proposing future research possibilities.Design/methodology/approachThe relevant literature was researched through online databases such as Scopus, Web of Science, Academic Search Premier, Emerald, IEEE Xplore, Science Direct, World Scientific Net and Springer-Link Journals, covering a period from 1999 to 2020. A systematic literature review based on 75 papers analyzed the integration of the concepts of enabling technologies, sustainability, circular economy and supply chain performance in agriculture supply chains.FindingsIt was identified that enabling technologies and agriculture supply chains alone have been explored further than integrated enabling technologies, sustainability, circular economy, supply chain performance and agriculture supply chains. Enabling technologies and agriculture supply chains' main findings are: enabling technologies have been studied to improve food safety, food quality and traceability in agriculture supply chains. The main results regarding integrated enabling technologies, sustainability, circular economy, supply chain performance and agriculture supply chains are: Internet of Things and information communication technology play an important role in addressing food security, traceability and food quality, which help achieve sustainable development goals.Originality/valueThis review study provides 13 research questions to underpin future trends regarding integrated technologies' application in agriculture supply chains for circular and sustainable growth.

Since it is an important human need and many organizations are involved in the value chain, the agricultural food supply chain is exposed to various risks that arise naturally or through human actions. This study aims to develop the application of a quality function deployment approach to increase the resilience of the food supply chain by understanding customer needs and logistical risks in the food supply chain. In-depth studies with empirical analysis were conducted to determine the importance of customer needs, food supply chain risks, and actions to improve supply chain resilience of SMEs in the agri-food industry. The result shows that the top three customer needs are "attractive, bright color", "firm texture" and "fresh smell". The top three risks in the agri-food supply chain are "improper storage," "Harvest Failure" and "Human Resource Risks" and the top three resilience actions are "continuous training," "preventive maintenance," and "supply chain forecasting." The implications of this study are to propose an idea that broadens the perspective of supply chain resilience in the agri-food industry by incorporating the needs of customers in considering how to mitigate the existing risks to the satisfaction of customers, and it also highlights the relatively low skill and coordination of the workforce in agri-food supply chains.

Herein, we examined the transformative potential of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) as new fronts in addressing some of the pertinent challenges posed by food integrity to human and animal health. In recent times, AI and ML, along with other Industry 4.0 technologies such as big data, blockchain, virtual reality, and the internet of things (IoT), have found profound applications within nearly all dimensions of the food industry with a key focus on enhancing food safety and quality and improving the resilience of the food supply chain. This paper provides an accessible scrutiny of these technologies (in particular, AI and ML) in relation to food integrity and gives a summary of their current advancements and applications within the field. Key areas of emphasis include the application of AI and ML in quality control and inspection, food fraud detection, process control, risk assessments, prediction, and management, and supply chain traceability, amongst other critical issues addressed. Based on the literature reviewed herein, the utilization of AI and ML in the food industry has unequivocally led to improved standards of food integrity and consequently enhanced public health and consumer trust, as well as boosting the resilience of the food supply chain. While these applications demonstrate significant promise, the paper also acknowledges some of the challenges associated with the domain-specific implementation of AI in the field of food integrity. The paper further examines the prospects and orientations, underscoring the significance of overcoming the obstacles in order to fully harness the capabilities of AI and ML in safeguarding the integrity of the food system.

Food supply chain (FSC) refers to the processes from production to delivery of food products from farmers to customers and is different from other kinds of supply chains because of the perishable nature of food. Among the current FSCs, the agricultural fruit supply chain has been paid the least attention. The fact that the quality of fruits deteriorates along supply chain processes and the lack of planning in different stages of FSC results in food loss, which has an impact on food security, insufficiency, and profitability. Therefore, reducing food loss will bring substantial benefits not only to FSC companies but also to society regarding food provision. The purpose of this paper is to present a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model for apple supply chain to manage inventory flows in different types of storage rooms for apples from different harvesting periods, while satisfying the demand. The model also reports the optimal type of each storage room. Food loss decision variables are defined to quantify the amount of apple losses in each type of storage room based on the time gap between the harvest and delivery. The objective function of the model is total cost minimization, including penalty costs for apple losses. The model is applied in a real industrial case study in Australia to show its applicability and is solved by Gurobi optimization solver 7.0.

Food and drink supply chains are complex, continually changing systems, involving many participants. They present stakeholders across the food and drinks industries with considerable challenges. Delivering performance in food supply chains offers expert perspectives to help practitioners and academics to improve their supply chain operations. The Editors have identified six key challenges in managing food and drinks supply chains. Each section of the book focuses on one of these important issues. The first chapters consider the fundamental role of relationship management in supply chains. The next section discusses another significant issue: aligning supply and demand. Part three considers five different approaches to effective and efficient process management, while quality and safety management, an issue food companies need to take very seriously, is subject of the next section. Parts five and six review issues which are currently driving change in food supply chains: the effective use of new technologies and the desire to deliver food sustainably and responsibly. With expert contributions from leaders in their fields, Delivering performance in food supply chains will help practitioners and academics to understand different approaches in supply chain management, explore alternative methods and develop more effective systems. Considers the fundamental role of relationship management in supply chains including an overview of performance measurement in the management of food supply chains Discusses the alignment of supply and demand in food supply chains and reviews sales and operations planning and marketing strategies for competitive advantage in the food industry Provides an overview of the effective use of new technologies and those that will be used in the future to deliver food sustainably and reliably