Blockchain For Food: Making Sense of Technology and the Impact on Biofortified Seeds

The global food system is under pressure and is in the early stages of a major transition towards more transparency, circularity, and personalisation. In the coming decades, there is an increasing need for more food production with fewer resources. Thus, increasing crop yields and nutritional value per crop is arguably an important factor in this global food transition. Biofortification can play an important role in feeding the world. Biofortified seeds create produce with increased nutritional values, mainly minerals and vitamins, while using the same or less resources as non-biofortified variants. However, a farmer cannot distinguish a biofortified seed from a regular seed. Due to the invisible nature of the enhanced seeds, counterfeit products are common, limiting wide-scale adoption of biofortified crops. Fraudulent seeds pose a major obstacle in the adoption of biofortified crops. A system that could guarantee the origin of the biofortified seeds is therefore required to ensure widespread adoption. This trust-ensuring immutable proof for the biofortified seeds, can be provided via blockchain technology

An open standard for the exchange of information in the Australian timber sector

The purpose of this paper is to describe business-to-business (B2B) communication and the characteristics of an open standard for electronic communication within the Australian timber and wood products industry. Current issues, future goals and strategies for using business-to-business communication will be considered. From the perspective of the Timber industry sector, this study is important because supply chain efficiency is a key component in an organisation's strategy to gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace. Strong improvement in supply chain performance is possible with improved business-to-business communication which is used both for building trust and providing real time marketing data. Traditional methods such as electronic data interchange (EDI) used to facilitate B2B communication have a number of disadvantages, such as high implementation and running costs and a rigid and inflexible messaging standard. Information and communications technologies (ICT) have supported the emergence of web-based EDI which maintains the advantages of the traditional paradigm while negating the disadvantages. This has been further extended by the advent of the Semantic web which rests on the fundamental idea that web resources should be annotated with semantic markup that captures information about their meaning and facilitates meaningful machine-to-machine communication. This paper provides an ontology using OWL (Web Ontology Language) for the Australian Timber sector that can be used in conjunction with semantic web services to provide effective and cheap B2B communications

Security and Privacy for Green IoT-based Agriculture: Review, Blockchain solutions, and Challenges

open access articleThis paper presents research challenges on security and privacy issues in the field of green IoT-based agriculture. We start by describing a four-tier green IoT-based agriculture architecture and summarizing the existing surveys that deal with smart agriculture. Then, we provide a classification of threat models against green IoT-based agriculture into five categories, including, attacks against privacy, authentication, confidentiality, availability, and integrity properties. Moreover, we provide a taxonomy and a side-by-side comparison of the state-of-the-art methods toward secure and privacy-preserving technologies for IoT applications and how they will be adapted for green IoT-based agriculture. In addition, we analyze the privacy-oriented blockchain-based solutions as well as consensus algorithms for IoT applications and how they will be adapted for green IoT-based agriculture. Based on the current survey, we highlight open research challenges and discuss possible future research directions in the security and privacy of green IoT-based agriculture

The Digitalisation of African Agriculture Report 2018-2019

An inclusive, digitally-enabled agricultural transformation could help achieve meaningful livelihood improvements for Africa’s smallholder farmers and pastoralists. It could drive greater engagement in agriculture from women and youth and create employment opportunities along the value chain. At CTA we staked a claim on this power of digitalisation to more systematically transform agriculture early on. Digitalisation, focusing on not individual ICTs but the application of these technologies to entire value chains, is a theme that cuts across all of our work. In youth entrepreneurship, we are fostering a new breed of young ICT ‘agripreneurs’. In climate-smart agriculture multiple projects provide information that can help towards building resilience for smallholder farmers. And in women empowerment we are supporting digital platforms to drive greater inclusion for women entrepreneurs in agricultural value chains

Interfaces of the Agriculture 4.0

The introduction of information technologies in the environmental field is impacting and changing even a traditional sector like agriculture. Nevertheless, Agriculture 4.0 and data-driven decisions should meet user needs and expectations. The paper presents a broad theoretical overview, discussing both the strategic role of design applied to Agri-tech and the issue of User Interface and Interaction as enabling tools in the field. In particular, the paper suggests to rethink the HCD approach, moving on a Human-Decentered Design approach that put together user-technology-environment and the importance of the role of calm technologies as a way to place the farmer, not as a final target and passive spectator, but as an active part of the process to aim the process of mitigation, appropriation from a traditional cultivation method to the 4.0 one

Agribusiness Extension: The Past, Present, and Future?

The IFAMR is publish by (IFAMA) the International Food and Agribusiness Management Association. www.ifama.orgagribusiness extension, future, Agribusiness, Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession, Q130,

Business Challenges in Commercialization of Agricultural Technology

Technology has been a major driver of both the agricultural productivity increases of the past century and the financial success of many farm and agribusiness firms. The challenges of bringing new technology to market in the agricultural industry are changing - it is no longer adequate to conceive a new invention and convince farmers with a strong marketing campaign that they should adopt the technology that results from this invention. One of the plenary sessions at the 2003 IAMA meetings in Cancun focused on the challenges and opportunities in creating value from new technology. Participants included: Michael Boehlje, Center for Food and Agricultural Business, Purdue University; Lynn White, Vice President, Global Ag Services, Deere; Marcello Arguelles, CEO of Biosidus; and Greg Clarke, Technical Director, FXA Group. This synopsis attempts to capture the key observations of the session presenters and the discussion that followed.Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

Innovation brokers and their roles in value chain-network innovation: preliminary findings and a research agenda

Intervention approaches have been implemented in developing countries to enhance farmer's livelihoods through improving their linkages to markets and inclusiveness in agricultural value chains. Such interventions are aimed at facilitating the inclusion of small farmers not just in the vertical activities of the value chain (coordination of the chain) but also in the horizontal activities (cooperation in the chain). Therefore value addition is made by not just innovating products and services, but also by innovating social processes, which we define as Value Chain-Network Innovation. In Value Chain-Network Innovation, linkage formation among networks and optimisation is one of the main objectives of innovation enhancing interventions. Here some important roles for innovation brokers are envisaged as crucial to dynamise this process, connecting different actors of the innovation system, paying special attention to the weaker ones. However, little attention has been given to identify different innovation brokering roles in those approaches, and to the need that they facilitate innovation processes and open safe spaces for innovation and social learning at different organisational settings and levels, to have more effective and sustainable impacts. This paper offers some preliminary empirical evidence of the roles of innovation brokers in a developing country setting, recognising the context-sensitive nature of innovations. Two cases from work experience with intervention approaches are analysed in light of the theories of innovation brokering, presenting some empirical evidence of different types of arrangements made by innovation brokers. A third case was taken from the literature. Data from questionnaires, key informant interviews, participant observations of different types of activities and processes carried out in those approaches, SWOT analysis and project reports were used for the analysis of different types of brokering roles and to draw some lessons. One important outcome of this preliminary analysis was that Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in integration with other media facilitate new ways of social organisation and interaction of innovation networks, which offer more possibilities for processes of innovation, aggregating value to the production and sharing of knowledge. There is already a transition of paradigm for approaching agricultural innovation to more participative and open approaches, which offers a promissory landscape for organising the value chain actors in a way that is more favourable for small farmers

Contextual impacts on industrial processes brought by the digital transformation of manufacturing: a systematic review

The digital transformation of manufacturing (a phenomenon also known as "Industry 4.0" or "Smart Manufacturing") is finding a growing interest both at practitioner and academic levels, but is still in its infancy and needs deeper investigation. Even though current and potential advantages of digital manufacturing are remarkable, in terms of improved efficiency, sustainability, customization, and flexibility, only a limited number of companies has already developed ad hoc strategies necessary to achieve a superior performance. Through a systematic review, this study aims at assessing the current state of the art of the academic literature regarding the paradigm shift occurring in the manufacturing settings, in order to provide definitions as well as point out recurring patterns and gaps to be addressed by future research. For the literature search, the most representative keywords, strict criteria, and classification schemes based on authoritative reference studies were used. The final sample of 156 primary publications was analyzed through a systematic coding process to identify theoretical and methodological approaches, together with other significant elements. This analysis allowed a mapping of the literature based on clusters of critical themes to synthesize the developments of different research streams and provide the most representative picture of its current state. Research areas, insights, and gaps resulting from this analysis contributed to create a schematic research agenda, which clearly indicates the space for future evolutions of the state of knowledge in this field

EDI - XML Standards and Technologies in the Agri-Food Industry

Due to globalisation, the new technological developments and the complexity of food supply processes, the European food sector is increasingly becoming more complex. The consumers’ trust in food, triggered and affected by a number of food crises, is low. Today, consumers increasingly expect safe and high quality food and demand information about the origin of their food. Also, the economic health of the food industry can be greatly affected by food crises; therefore, efficient and effective mechanisms are required to assist the food industry in tracking and tracing products along the food chain. In this paper, we discuss the criteria for an efficient and effective traceability system from an IT perspective (mainly data exchange) and we identify key requirements for ICT enabled traceability