The best way to ensure organic farming is to let machines monitor a growth of vegetables and fruits.

Non-organic foodstuff could cause lots of illnesses, from simple allergies to oncological diseases. Millions of people fall sick for food-related reasons every year.

In developed countries consumers more and more are willing to overpay for organically grown products. However, to date, they have to rely fully on good intentions of farmers in terms of food safety, as third-party monitoring systems are non-existent, and temptation of farmers to cheat could be quite big.

The existing technologies of organic certification vary from country to country. However, the main two options are present everywhere — inspections and record-keeping. The inspections of farms are annual activities with a physical tour around a farm, examination of records, and an oral interviews. The records are written by a farmer and should cover all activities on a farm. Definitely, there is a room for fraud.

However, the situation in terms of certification could be improved easily and cost-efficiently thanks to new technologies, namely blockchain-based IoT.

The Airalab team developed Robonomics platform that allows to get away from the subjective assessments and make judgements and issue certificates based on constant flow of data from sensors. Moreover, any consumer could initiate an additional machine-based inspection of a farm at any time having some spare ethers (could be exchange to XRT tokens) or XRT tokens.

The easiest way to use the platform is the following. A farmer (or an integrator) installs IoT measuring devices on a farm and connects them to blockchain-based Robonomics network. The data are published through Robonomics blockchain protocol, which ensures the authenticity of measurements, prohibits their retroactive altering and makes these data public. This transparency helps farmers not only to ensure fraud-free organic practices but also to build reputation. The consumers get not only organically grown products but additional value in terms of entire history of growth conditions.

In January this year the Airalab team, the developers of Robonomics network, during a hackathon demonstrated a prototype consisted of Libelium CO sensor on Waspmote Gases Pro platform measuring the level of the gas concentration and transmitting it to the sensor network page. It worked perfectly well. Definitely, in real life the number of sensors could be expanded and include soil and other ones.

Also in real life anybody (not only a farmer) can ensure permanent data gathering from any sensors by sending funds to Robonomics network and thus creating a smart contract for any chosen period. The smart contract provides automatic data publication on the Ethereum network.

A smart contract is created on the Ethereum network, and it’s possible to see it in the Etherscan browser. As long as there are funds available the network continues to publish data automatically, thus a process of the certification could be simplified in terms of steps needed to prove that the produce meets the organic food requirements. Moreover, the certificate could be issued and prolonged automatically for different types of products.

In the best case future scenario, the consumers should be able to access all gathered data using the product ID, barcode or RFID tag. The Robonomics platform could be used to link together data on a particular product from entire supply chain, thus creating a full product history. The best thing is that data linkage could be initiated not only by food producers but also food consumers.