A Proposed Model for Precision Agriculture Using IoT-Blockchain Systems

The global agricultural sector faces mounting pressure to increase productivity sustainably while managing complex data challenges related to security, traceability, and real-time monitoring. Conventional farming systems are unable to address the compounding demands of rising global population, climate variability, and fragmented supply chains. This paper proposes a comprehensive model for precision agriculture that integrates Internet of Things (IoT) sensing infrastructure with blockchain-based data management to enable secure, transparent, and scalable agricultural operations. The proposed framework incorporates a layered architecture comprising IoT data acquisition, edge computing preprocessing, smart contract-driven storage decision logic, and a hybrid blockchain layer that balances permissioned privacy with permissionless transparency. An energyefficient clustering protocol derived from the Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) model is adapted for agricultural IoT networks to reduce communication overhead and extend network lifetime. Smart contracts govern data immutability, supply chain traceability from seed to consumer, and automated threshold-based alerts for crop monitoring parameters. The framework is evaluated through MATLAB-based IoT network simulation and Hyperledger Fabric/Ethereum blockchain benchmarking against key performance indicators including end-to-end latency, transaction throughput, on-chain storage efficiency, and energy consumption per round. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves 86.2% on-chain storage reduction, 99.1% transaction success rate, 14% latency increase under a 10× device load increase, and 115% extended IoT network lifetime compared to standard LEACH — representing significant improvements over both conventional IoT-only and centralized database architectures. The proposed model addresses critical research gaps in unified cross-domain IoT-blockchain integration for agriculture, offering a practical and scalable reference architecture for modern precision farming environments.