BCST-APTS: Blockchain and CP-ABE Empowered Data Supervision, Sharing, and Privacy Protection Scheme for Secure and Trusted Agricultural Product Traceability System

Blockchain provides new technologies and ideas for the construction of agricultural product traceability system (APTS). However, if data is stored, supervised, and distributed on a multiparty equal blockchain, it will face major security risks, such as data privacy leakage, unauthorized access, and trust issues. How to protect the privacy of shared data has become a key factor restricting the implementation of this technology. We propose a secure and trusted agricultural product traceability system (BCST-APTS), which is supported by blockchain and CP-ABE encryption technology. It can set access control policies through data attributes and encrypt data on the blockchain. This can not only ensure the confidentiality of the data stored in the blockchain, but also set flexible access control policies for the data. In addition, a whole-chain attribute management infrastructure has been constructed, which can provide personalized attribute encryption services. Furthermore, a reencryption scheme based on ciphertext-policy attribute encryption (RE-CP-ABE) is proposed, which can meet the needs of efficient supervision and sharing of ciphertext data. Finally, the system architecture of the BCST-APTS is designed to successfully solve the problems of mutual trust, privacy protection, fine-grained, and personalized access control between all parties.

Supply Chain Governance of Agricultural Products under Big Data Platform Based on Blockchain Technology

The present work serves to improve the stable cooperation relationship among subjects of supply chain such as enterprises, farmers, intermediary organizations, and retailers and enhance the governance and optimization of agricultural product supply chain, thus strengthening the competitiveness of China’s agricultural industry. The supply chain governance of agricultural products is taken as the research object. Initially, the stabilities of two supply chain organization modes, “company and farmer” and “company, intermediary organization and farmer,” are analyzed by static game analysis. Then, based on the above analysis and the characteristics of blockchain institutional technology, a detailed analyzation is made on the mechanism of supply chain of agricultural products governance based on blockchain technology. Finally, the functional framework of agricultural supply chain governance is designed based on the basic framework of blockchain technology, and analyzation is made on the trust mechanism and contract mechanism of agricultural supply chain governance based on blockchain technology. The research results show that problems such as information and cognitive constraints in agricultural supply chain governance cannot be completely solved only through the evolution of blockchain organizational structure and the supply of governance mechanism, and speculative behavior will still appear. Optimizing the governance of supply chain of agricultural products based on blockchain technology can realize the transformation of its governance scenario. Meanwhile, the blockchain technologies such as deintermediation, demistrust, and intelligent contract play an important role in the process of agricultural supply chain governance, which can make it change in many aspects such as organization mode, application operation, and governance mechanism. The rapid development of new generation information technologies such as blockchain, the Internet of Things, and computer technology makes it possible to comprehensively digitize economic activities such as production and transaction in the supply chain of agricultural products. The present work combines the technical logic of blockchain digital governance with the institutional logic of agricultural product supply chain governance and tries to solve the instability problems caused by imperfect organization, lack of trust, and incomplete contract in agricultural product supply chain governance with the characteristics of blockchain such as deintermediation, demistrust, and intelligent contract.

The Economies Scale of Agricultural Product Processing Companies Listed on Stock Exchange in Hochiminh City and Hanoi, Vietnam

This study applied the Cobb-Douglas production function to identify economics efficiency of 18agricultural product processing companies listed on the Stock exchange in Ho Chi Minh City(HOSE) and Hanoi (HNX) in such sectors as fisheries, rubber and sugar in the period 2009-2013.The method employed FEM and REM models using panel data. The results showed thatperformance of all and each sector in this study has increasing returns to scale. In particular,firms in the sectors of fisheries and rubber primarily relied on raising capital to increasetheiroutput value, while those in the sugar sectormainly increase labors toimprove theiroutput value. Finally, the paper also provides some policy implications to improve theefficiency of capital and labor in the agricultural product processing companies.

Mathematical modeling and thermodynamic properties in the drying of citron watermelon seeds

ABSTRACT Citron watermelon is an agricultural product of excellent economic potential. Its seeds are widely used for oil extraction, serving as an energy source, showing nutritional characteristics that make them a suitable product to be studied. Thus, the objective was to characterize citron watermelon seeds regarding their physicochemical composition, in addition to determining drying kinetics, fitting mathematical models to the data, and determining the effective diffusivity coefficients and thermodynamic properties. The seeds were dried in a convective dryer, varying the drying temperature, with air velocity of 1.0 m s-1. With the increase in drying temperature, there were reductions in moisture content, water activity (aw), ash concentration, total titratable acidity, lipids and reducing sugar. Citron watermelon seeds are rich in lipids and ash, have low sugar concentration and low acidity; their drying kinetics was very well described by the Two Terms and Approximation of Diffusion models, followed by the models of Midilli and Page, which resulted in acceptable fits. Effective diffusivity accompanied the increase in drying temperature, and this behavior was well fitted by an Arrhenius-type equation. Enthalpy and entropy variations were reduced with drying temperature, with increments in Gibbs free energy.

Foodborne Pathogen Inactivation by Cold Plasma Reactive Species

Cold plasma is implemented in the food industry for protecting the agricultural product from foodborne pathogens. In this case, dielectric barrier discharge cold plasma pen (DBD-CP) was applied to study its efficiency in inactivation of bacterial on oyster mushroom. The surface of the fresh oyster mushroom was treated with 5 kV of AC voltage with variable of treatment times (0-4 min). Data showed sufficient energy by DBD-CPP has inactivated the existence of bacterial on the oyster mushroom surface with undetectable of bacteria colony. The reactive species generated by cold plasma undoubtedly irreversibly damage the deoxyribonucleic acid, ribonucleic acid, and enzymes of gram bacterial, which eventually causes cell death. Above all, an understanding of the microorganism cell structure, the food surface types, and roughness is an essential in manipulating cold plasma processing parameters to achieve the maximum rate of microbial inactivation.

PELATIHAN DAN PENYULUHAN PENDIRIAN BUMDES DAN KOPERASI PADA KELOMPOK TANI DESA PESISIR BUKIT, KECAMATAN GUNUNG TUJUH, KABUPATEN KERINCI

Agricultural development policies are implemented to improve food security, develop agribusiness, and improve farmers' welfare so that the agricultural products produced must meet the requirements for quantity, quality, and sustainability, as well as being competitive and easy to obtain at affordable prices. The potential that exists in the form of food agricultural products, horticultural plantations, livestock, and agro-tourism development needs to be managed properly through the existence of BUMDes and village cooperatives. Therefore, mentoring activities, in the form of training and counseling on the procedures for establishing BUMDes and cooperatives for the sustainability of agricultural product management, both pre- and post-harvest. This service will provide training and counseling to farmer groups in Pesisir Bukit Village, Kerinci Regency, so that they can establish BUMDes and cooperatives to increase agricultural commodity yields and develop village potential. The end result of this service activity is that farmers can manage agricultural products and develop village potential through BUMDes and cooperatives so that they have an impact on improving living standards.

Optimal Decision-Making Model of Agricultural Product Information Based on Three-Way Decision Theory

As an effective heuristic method, three-way decision theory gives a new semantic interpretation to the three fields of the rough set, which has a huge application space. To classify the information of agricultural products more accurately under certain thresholds, this paper first makes a comprehensive evaluation of the decision, particularly the influence of the attributes of the event itself on the results and their interactions. By using fuzzy sets corresponding to membership and non-membership degree, this paper analyzes and puts forward two cases of proportional correlation coefficients in the transformation of a delayed decision domain, and selects the corresponding coefficients to compare the results directly. Finally, consumers can conveniently grasp product attribute information to make decisions. On this basis, this paper analyzed the standard data to verify the accuracy of the model. After that, the proposed algorithm, based on three decision-making agricultural product information classification processing, is applied to the relevant data of agricultural products. The experimental results showed that the algorithm can obtain more accurate results through a more straightforward calculation process. It can be concluded that the algorithm proposed in this paper can enable people to make more convenient and accurate decisions based on product attribute information.

The role of fine management techniques in association between agricultural pollution and farmer income: The case of fruit industry

Abstract text is required. Whilst the agriculture enjoys booming development, it is facing increasingly serious environmental pressures. With the growth of fruit planting scale, the inorganic minerals elements are one of the main sources of non-point pollution. How to achieve the sustainable production of agriculture is an issue that needs urgent attention in the current rural development. In this paper, based on the micro-production data of peach farmers in eighteen prefecture-level provinces, we introduce fine management techniques into the production function to analyze the effects of different techniques and further explore the influence of fine management techniques on the fertilizer efficiency. Findings show that with no changes in the degree of fine management techniques investment, the increase of chemical fertilizers and pesticides not only made little contribution to increase in profit, but also resulted in excessive investment of fertilizers that worsens the environment. Notably, the fine management techniques exerting positive effects on the application efficiency of minerals elements could be an efficient and sustainable way to ease the conflict between environment and profit. However, those techniques are rarely used in practices due to the lack of economic incentives. A brief review of main measures, such as market information timely-updating，agricultural product branding, and socialized services, is offered.

Study on the optimization of spray drying process for Areca taro powder with microcystalline cellulose

Starch is a product of intensive processing of agricultural products. During the processing of plant starch, nutrients such as protein, dietary fiber, and minerals are removed. In addition to nutritional imbalance, rich nutrients have an impact on the environment. The object of research is Areca taro, a starch-rich agricultural product. The research aims to use spray drying technology to obtain a whole betel nut taro powder for food processing, such as sausages and noodles. The taro is used as a raw material, and the whole taro flour is obtained after peeling, cutting, crushing with water, and spray drying. Using single factor and orthogonal experiment to optimize the spray drying process parameters and embedding agent of taro powder, and then analyze its physical and chemical properties. The results show that adding 0.01 % Xanthan gum+0.12 % Microcrystalline cellulose (embedded agent) to the taro emulsion can increase the extraction rate of taro flour, speed up the drying speed, and prevent sticking to the wall. The best process of spray drying: the speed of atomizer was 16000 r/m, the wind temperature was 200 °C, the material liquid concentration was 28.00 % and the feeding rate was 75 mL/min. The taro powder produced by this process has better liquidity, light purple color, smooth texture, and strong flavor of taro. Product parameters: powder fluidity was 13.9 cm, extraction rate was 15.36 %, water activity was 0.416, chromaticity parameters were 19.73 (L* value), 2.96 (a* value) and 3.25 (b* value), bulk density was 0.44 g/mL. This technology can provide data support and reference for food processing companies. The taro whole powder would be widely used as food ingredients in future.