Promoting Sustainable Agricultural Practices Through Incentives

For a better and more sustainable use of irrigation water in this article we present a system that incentivises and rewards virtuous behaviour in agricultural practices in a given multi-actor ecosystem while maintaining yield and improving quality of crops. The ongoing experimentation illustrated here takes place in the Northern Alps region of Italy and is made of IoT monitoring and actuating devices that, with the support of blockchain technologies and smart contracts enable the release of value (monetary or through value-add services) to the contributing actors based on monitored behaviours. Besides the specifics of the particular application the article illustrates how the presented framework could also be the common base for similar type of precision agriculture applications where widespread distributed IoT monitoring technologies and ledgers can be used to incentivise virtuous behaviours and fulfilll given stakeholders interests.