The agricultural industry went through a major metamorphosis during the industrial revolution, and it might be set for another groundbreaking evolutionary stage now. With the rise of blockchain technology, the farming and agricultural sectors are witnessing a lot of innovation and improvements. According to the founders of AgTech company Dimitra, the opportunities for the agricultural sector to benefit from blockchain-based tech are endless. Find out more about the future of AgTech in the latest Cointelegraph Interview below. Agriculture and technology merge Q: Is the adoption of blockchain technology becoming more widespread across the agricultural industry? What are the main challenges …

A new insurance world is coming where smart contracts replace insurance documents, blockchain “oracles” supplant claim adjusters, and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) take over traditional insurance carriers. Millions of poor farmers in Africa and Asia will be eligible for coverages like crop insurance too, whereas before, they were too poor and too dispersed to justify the cost of underwriting. That is the vision, anyway, on display in the recent Smartcon 2022, a two-day conference that sought to provide “exclusive insights into the next generation of Web3 innovation.” Subsistence farms, where families basically live off what they grow and almost nothing …

The global food and agriculture industry is a trillion-dollar sector that is growing exponentially. According to findings from the World Bank, agriculture alone accounted for 4% of global domestic product, or GDP, of the United States in 2018. The report further noted that agriculture could account for more than 25% of GDP in developing countries. Meanwhile, it’s important to point out that large corporate farms play a dominant role in the agriculture industry. For instance, research from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) shows that major farms accounted for 89% of food production in the U.S. in 2015. This …

Teucrium Trading, an agriculture-focused exchange-traded fund provider, is planning to expand its ETF suite with Bitcoin. On Thursday, the company filed an application with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission to launch a Bitcoin (BTC) ETF that would track a benchmark of Bitcoin futures contracts. Dubbed Teucrium Bitcoin Futures Fund, the planned ETF is designed to provide investors with a way to gain price exposure to the Bitcoin market. Should the SEC approve the new product, Teucrium will issue shares that trade on the NYSE Arca stock exchange under the symbol BCFU. The contract would be settled in cash, …

While the agricultural industry stands to reap enormous efficiency savings through the adoption of distributed ledger technologies, many farmers lack the digital infrastructure to support the integration of blockchain solutions. Speaking as part of Australian Blockchain Week on Wednesday, Bridie Ohlsson, CEO of digital agricultural infrastructure provider Geora, discussed the challenges associated with fostering DLT adoption within primary industries. “In ag tech, it's been a problem of not having enough infrastructure, not there not being a use case,” she said. “As long as we have farmers calling up and saying, ‘Hey, your product looks great, but I don’t have internet …

Argentina's brittle economy — stricken by endemic problems that have only worsened amid the COVID-19 pandemic — has sparked rising unrest in the country's agricultural sector. Earlier this month, representatives of the bulk of national producers rejected President Alberto Fernandez’s government's decision to suspend all exports of corn as part of its efforts to stem inflation and exert downward pressure on domestic corn prices. The farmers' strike followed a similar wave of resistance in the oilseed and soy industries in December 2020. The rise in labor unrest poses a challenge for the stewards of the national economy, given that agriculture …

On Nov. 18, blockchain solutions provider BlockApps launched a blockchain-based agricultural crop tracking network called "TraceHarvest" — and one of the largest companies in the world, Bayer, is among its first users. TraceHarvest reportedly provides users with the ability to trace the life cycle of agricultural products starting from the source of seeds, all the way to defining the responsibilities of each party involved in the supply chain. The platform also provides users with information in real-time, ideally mitigating problems associated with manually tracking crops. TraceHarvest is open to all participants in the supply chain such as farmers, dealers, manufacturers, …

Following two years of pilot testing, a blockchain trade and financing platform for global agricultural trading has seen its commercial rollout from Swiss developer Cerealia SA. The launch follows extensive prelaunch trial implementation with firms from Algeria, Brazil, Dubai, Japan and Ukraine. In November 2018, Cointelegraph reported on the platform’s early use to conduct a pilot transaction of Black Sea wheat from the Russian port city of Novorossiysk. Cerealia told reporters that it has sought to address the need for a fast trading platform in the global Russian wheat market and to combine this with a more reliable, transparent and …

The Australian government-backed agricultural supply chain platform Entrust has announced it will operate on Hedera Hashgraph — a distributed ledger platform claiming a transactional throughput of 10,000 transactions per second. South Australia’s premier, Steven Marshall, officially launched Entrust on September 20, describing the platform’s initial focus as protecting the wine and dairy manufacturing industries from counterfeit fraud in the global markets, and driving efficiency savings across agricultural sectors. Entrust is a software-as-a-service platform that tracks the movement of primary products (such as wine grapes) across the local agricultural supply chain, as well as the supply chain of the secondary manufactured …

Food industry officials in the United Arab Emirates may soon have a blockchain-based supply chain to obtain agricultural products directly from India. According to an Aug. 31 report, officials in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) will be using Agriota E-Marketplace, a new platform that employs blockchain technology to bridge the gap between farmers in India and the nation’s food industry. Agriota reportedly provides transparency by verifying the food supply chain from Indian farms to food processing companies, traders and wholesalers in the UAE. Essentially, the platform will allow Indian farmers to connect directly with food industry firms in the UAE …

Arbol, a platform that allows farmers to hedge weather risks, is integrating Chainlink data oracles. Arbol's CEO, Siddhartha Jha, told Cointelegraph that the company uses blockchain technology to solve a problem that affects billions of people around the world: “It's crazy that so much of the world's livelihood, it's about two to three billion people, they estimate, is affected by weather day to day.” Farmers are likely the hardest hit by weather unpredictability. For many, severe weather conditions can lead to the loss of their livelihood, or even starvation. Although farmer insurance has been around for decades — if not …

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has proposed amending its rules on organic products to include implementing blockchain technology to trace its supply chain. According to an Aug. 5 report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS), the agency said it expects electronic tracking systems, including digital ledger technology (DLT), will play an “essential role” in the traceability of its supply chain of organic products. “DLT can provide secure, verifiable, transparent, and near-instantaneous tracking at the item level in complex supply chains,” the report stated. “Critically, DLT can also protect confidential business information and trade secret information …