The use of data and information becomes increasingly crucial for the agriculture sector to improve productivity and sustainability. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) substantially increases the effectiveness and efficiency of collecting, storing, analyzing and using data in agriculture. It allows agricultural practitioners and farming communities to easily obtain update-to-date information and thus make better decisions in their daily farming. For example, remotely sensed data on soil conditions can support farmers’ crop management, mobile phones reduce information cost and thus promote farmers’ access to markets and financial support, and the development of Global Positioning System (GPS) facilitates filed mapping and machinery guidance and crop scouting.

Information and Communication Technology does not avoid bias in the collection and use of data. An effective way of avoiding such bias is to make data manipulation difficult or even impossible by distributing the power of data management to a very large number of individuals.

A blockchain is a ledger in which agents take turns recording information on the process of generating, transacting and consuming a product or service. The ledger is collectively managed by all participating parties typically through a peer-to-peer network. A new record must be verified by the network before adding it to the blockchain. Any alteration to the recorded data should follow consensus decision-making protocol, meaning the majority of the parties involved should agree. In addition, an alteration to one record will lead to the alteration of all its subsequent records. It is, therefore, almost impossible to change in data recorded in a blockchain in practice. Blockchain is viewed as “an open, distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently and in a verifiable and permanent way”. Blockchain is a transformative ICT that have the potential to revolutionized how data is used for agriculture.