IoT–Blockchain Integration for Smart Agriculture: A Systematic Review of Architectures, Applications, Benchmarking, and Open Challenges

IoT-blockchain convergence has the potential to improve smart agriculture by supporting immutable provenance chains, cryptographic data integrity, and decentralized trust mechanisms across agricultural value networks. This systematic review examines integrated system architectures, communication protocols, consensus frameworks, and applications including supply chain provenance tracking, precision agriculture, crop monitoring, and parametric insurance. [1] The literature suggests an architectural migration from centralized cloud models toward edge-distributed and multi-ledger topologies designed to mitigate consensus latency, throughput constraints, interoperability gaps, and energy overhead. Blockchain is commonly used as a trust and auditability layer in many proposed systems, recording transactions and executing smart contract logic, while IoT sensor networks provide distributed field-scale biophysical measurements. The review indicates the need for standardized evaluation criteria for throughput, latency, energy consumption, and reporting transparency, identifying persistent deficits: field-validated implementations, privacy-preserving mechanisms, and technology accessibility for smallholder communities. Future trajectories align with Agriculture 5.0 paradigms, prioritizing edge-embedded intelligence, energy-efficient consensus protocols, and inclusive deployment architectures that accommodate heterogeneous stakeholder capabilities.[16]