Blockchain-Based Supply Chain Transparency for Agricultural Produce: A Systematic Literature Review and System Design

Abstract

Agricultural supply chains involve many independent participants—farmers, aggregators, cold-storage operators, distributors, and retailers—each of whom typically records custody, quality, and pricing information in a separate, non-interoperable system, if at all. This fragmentation makes it difficult for any single participant, and nearly impossible for the end consumer, to verify where a given batch of produce originated, how it was handled in transit, or whether the claims printed on its label (organic, fair-trade, pesticide-free) are actually true. This paper surveys eight recent works on blockchain-based agricultural traceability, spanning farm-to-fork provenance frameworks, smart-contract-driven payment and quality-verification systems, consensus-mechanism surveys, IoT-integrated cold-chain monitoring, decentralized organic certification, hybrid blockchain-cloud architectures, consumer-facing QR/RFID applications, and cross-border interoperability studies. Read together, these works show a consistent movement away from siloed, paper-or database-based record-keeping and toward tamper-evident, cryptographically verifiable custody chains. At the same time, nearly every reviewed system still depends on an unverified, manual data-entry step at the point where a physical batch first enters the digital ledger—the so-called last-mile trust gap—and few works give ordinary consumers or smallholder farmers an interface simple enough to use without technical training. Building on these findings, the paper presents the design of a Blockchain-Based Agricultural Supply-Chain Transparency Platform: a three-tier architecture combining an IoT and RFID/QR data-capture layer at each custody transfer, a permissioned Hyperledger Fabric ledger that records hashed provenance and quality events with off-chain bulk storage on IPFS, and a consumer- and farmer-facing application layer that renders the resulting custody chain as a scannable, human-readable provenance trail. The architecture is intended to move agricultural supply chains from opaque, trust-based coordination toward verifiable, evidence-based transparency.