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IBM Research, in collaboration with Hello Tractor, has announced a new project that will focus on developing an agriculture digital wallet based on artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain technology.
The project was announced today, December 11, at TechCrunch Battlefield in Lagos, Nigeria.
Founded in 2014, Hello Tractor is a technology company that promotes tractor co-sharing throughout African agricultural communities. Its mobile app aggregates tractor service requests and matches them with recommended tractors and operators, while tracking the number of hours each equipment is in the field and area serviced.
IBM Research said that it is working with Hello Tractor to apply innovative technologies including the Watson Decision Platform for Agriculture, blockchain, the Internet of Things (IoT) and IBM Cloud, to the app. It said that the idea is to create an “agricultural digital wallet”, which it describes as:
“a blockchain-enabled and AI-based decision support platform that enables capturing, tracking, and instant sharing of data, while creating end-to-end trust and transparency for all the parties involved across the agribusiness value chain.”
Blockchain technology will provide a tamper-proof record of demand-side and supply-side workflows from tractor request to fulfillment, payments, and distribution of proceeds, authorized access to services and more.
The project aims to digitize, optimize and streamline agricultural business processes, thereby enhancing efficiencies and creating new services from farm to fork. The new services will be tested in a pilot starting in the first half of 2019, according to the announcement.
For the next phase, the project partners are looking to use machine learning with image recognition to predict the quality of cultivation. They are also working to expand the platform beyond Nigeria to Kenya, Mozambique, Senegal, Tanzania, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
