the trust machine, the trust machine, a distributed and decentralized architecture through which everyone can verify and no one holds the power of control. For this (abstract) attitude, blockchain is considered the tool capable of supporting the fight against corruption, fighting illegal trades, initiating virtuous processes of fight against poverty and much more.

Today, the world’s agri-food sector is facing the most urgent challenge of our time: feeding billions of people and at the same time tackling climate change problems. Agriculture feeds the world but at the same time is one of the causes of global warming, with 24% of harmful emissions. Two sides of the same coin that can no longer coexist, at least with these relationships, and that can find a solution only by innovating the sector throughout the supply chain, from production to distribution. The answer can come from 4.0 technologies.

RuralHack 2019 report

With these challenges, of course, Italy must also face up to these challenges (where the agricultural sector has a total value of 133 billion euros and offers work to 3.2 million people) but our country also faces two other great evils: Italian sounding and the Counterfeit. It is estimated that the value of fake Made in Italy agri-food in the world is about 100 billion, with a record increase of 70% over the last decade, while the turnover of agromafias is 24.5 billion.

For both global and characteristic problems of our country, a possible help comes from the blockchain.

The paper by researchers at RuralHack, a project within Societing4.0 that investigates both the cultural and technological aspects of the relationship between Open Hardware and agriculture, identified the existence of 42 projects in the food supply chain based on the blockchain -international and Italian – from 2016 to 2018, the number of which has doubled in the last year. These initiatives are implemented in different areas (in 24% of cases), or are dedicated to specific supply chains such as meat (in 21%), fruit and vegetables (in 17%) cereal (in 10%). In 50% of cases, a strong leading role was found by distribution and transformation actors.

In this context, process automation at all major stages of agricultural production, offered by agBot Landlify, represents an extraordinary opportunity to help consolidate the sense of the term “trust” associated with blockchain technology, not only and not only linked to the technological paradigm of inviolability in the flow of recorded transactions, but also and above all to their original veracity.