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As the global food safety problem has increasingly become severe and supply chain reforms and food recalls are costly and challenging, it is particularly important to establish agricultural food traceability systems. Countries around the world are paying increasing attention to developing food safety traceability systems. Under the background of smart agriculture, information and communication technology can be further improved through blockchain infrastructure to achieve new farms and digital agriculture, thus ensuring end-to-end safety traceability of agricultural products from planting to sale. Through the analysis of the latest domestic and international research, this paper systematically elaborates on recent progress in research on agricultural food traceability based on blockchain technology. It dissects the processes of agricultural food supply chains, and proposes a basic architecture of blockchain in the field of agricultural food traceability. In addition, this paper summarizes the application of blockchain in agricultural food traceability, focusing mainly on blockchain combination with cloud-edge computing, encryption technology, storage optimization, consensus mechanism improvement, and smart contract design. It also points out the challenges in data security, storage scalability, regulatory difficulties, and practical applications. Finally, it proposes future direction for blockchain technology in agricultural food traceability such as strengthening security supervision, improving blockchain scalability, and empowering food traceability with emerging technologies. It emphasizes the opportunities and challenges in the application of blockchain technology in the agricultural food supply chains.

ObjectiveIn the retail market for agricultural products, consumers are increasingly concerned about the safety and health aspects of those products. Traceability of blockchain has emerged as a crucial solution to address these concerns. Essentially, a blockchain functions as a dynamic, distributed, and shared database. When implemented in the agricultural supply chain, it not only improves product transparency to attract more consumers but also raises concerns about consumer privacy disclosure. The level of consumer apprehension regarding privacy will directly influence their choice to purchase agricultural products traced through blockchain-traced. Moreover, retailers' choices to sell blockchain-traced produce are influenced by consumer privacy concerns. By analyzing the impact of blockchain technology on the competitive strategies, pricing, and decision-making among agricultural retailers, they can develop market competition strategies that suit their market conditions to bolster their competitiveness and optimize the agricultural supply chain to maximize overall benefits.MethodsBased on Nash equilibrium and Stackelberg game theory, a market competition model was developed to analyze the interactions between existing and new agricultural product retailers. The competitive strategies adopted by agricultural product retailers were analyzed under four different options of whether two agricultural retailers sell blockchain agricultural products. It delved into product utility, optimal pricing, demand, and profitability for each retailer under these different scenarios. How consumer privacy concerns impact pricing and profits of two agricultural product retailers and the optimal response strategy choice of another retailer when the competitor made the decision choice first were also analyzed. This analysis aimed to guide agricultural product retailers in making strategic choices that would safeguard their profits and market positions. To address the cooperative game problem of agricultural product retailers in market competition, ensure that retailers could better cooperate in the game, blockchain smart contract technology was used. By encoding the process and outcomes of the Stackelberg game into smart contracts, retailers could input their specific variables and receive tailored strategy recommendations. Uploading game results onto the blockchain network ensured transparency and encouraged cooperative behavior among retailers. By using the characteristics of blockchain, the game results were uploaded to the blockchain network to regulate the cooperative behavior, to ensure the maximization of the overall interests of the supply chain.Results and DiscussionsThe research highlighted the significant improvement in agricultural product quality transparency through blockchain traceability technology. However, concerns regarding consumer privacy arising from this traceability could directly impact the pricing, profitability and retailers' decisions to provide blockchain-traceable items. Furthermore, an analysis of the strategic balance between two agricultural product retailers revealed that in situations of low and high product information transparency, both retailers were inclined to simultaneously offer sell traceable products. In such a scenario, blockchain traceability technology enhanced the utility and profitability of retail agricultural products, leading consumers to prefer purchase these traceable products from retailers. In cases where privacy concerns and agricultural product information transparency were both moderate, the initial retailer was more likely to opt for blockchain-based traceable products. This was because consumers had higher trust in the initial retailer, enabling them to bear a higher cost associated with privacy concerns. Conversely, new retailers failed to gain a competitive advantage and eventually exit the market. When consumer privacy concerns exceeded a certain threshold, both competing agricultural retailers discovered that offering blockchain-based traceable products led to a decline in their profits.ConclusionsWhen it comes to agricultural product quality and safety, incorporating blockchain technology in traceability significantly improves the transparency of quality-related information for agricultural products. However, it is important to recognize that the application of blockchain for agricultural product traceability is not universally suitable for all agricultural retailers. Retailers must evaluate their unique circumstances and make the most suitable decisions to enhance the effectiveness of agricultural products, drive sales demand, and increase profits. Within the competitive landscape of the agricultural product retail market, nurturing a positive collaborative relationship is essential to maximize mutual benefits and optimize the overall profitability of the agricultural product supply chain.

As an emerging concept, metaverse has attracted extensive attention from industry, academia and scientific research field. The combination of agriculture and metaverse will greatly promote the development of agricultural informatization and agricultural intelligence, provide new impetus for the transformation and upgrading of agricultural intelligence. Firstly, to expound feasibility of the application research of metaverse in agriculture, the basic principle and key technologies of agriculture metaverse were briefly described, such as blockchain, non-fungible token, 5G/6G, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, 3D reconstruction, cloud computing, edge computing, augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality, brain computer interface, digital twins and parallel system. Then, the main scenarios of three agricultural applications of metaverse in the fields of virtual farm, agricultural teaching system and agricultural product traceability system were discussed. Among them, virtual farm is one of the most important applications of agricultural metaverse. Agricultural metaverse can help the growth of crops and the raising of livestock and poultry in the field of agricultural production, provide a three-dimensional and visual virtual leisure agricultural experience, provide virtual characters in the field of agricultural product promotion. The agricultural metaverse teaching system can provide virtual agricultural teaching similar to natural scenes, save training time and improve training efficiency by means of fragmentation. Traceability of agricultural products can let consumers know the production information of agricultural products and feel more confident about enterprises and products. Finally, the challenges in the development of agricultural metaverse were summarized in the aspects of difficulties in establishing agricultural metaverse system, weak communication foundation of agricultural metaverse, immature agricultural metaverse hardware equipment and uncertain agricultural meta universe operation, and the future development directions of agricultural metaverse were prospected. In the future, researches on the application of metaverse, agricultural growth mechanism, and low power wireless communication technologies are suggested to be carried out. A rural broadband network covering households can be established. The industrialization application of agricultural meta universe can be promoted. This review can provide theoretical references and technical supports for the development of metaverse in the field of agriculture.

In today's globalized agricultural system, information leakage of agricultural biological risk factors can lead to business risks and public panic, jeopardizing corporate reputation. To solve the above problems, this study constructs a blockchain network for agricultural product biological risk traceability based on agricultural product biological risk factor data to achieve traceability of biological risk traceability data of agricultural product supply chain to meet the sustainability challenges. To guarantee the secure and flexible sharing of agricultural product biological risk privacy information and limit the scope of privacy information dissemination, the blockchain-based proxy re-encryption access control method (BBPR-AC) is designed. Aiming at the problems of proxy re-encryption technology, such as the third-party agent being prone to evil, the authorization judgment being cumbersome, and the authorization process not automated, we design the proxy re-encryption access control mechanism based on the traceability of agricultural products' biological risk factors. Designing an attribute-based access control (ABAC) mechanism based on the traceability blockchain for agricultural products involves defining the attributes of each link in the agricultural supply chain, formulating policies, and evaluating and executing these policies, deployed in the blockchain system in the form of smart contracts. This approach achieves decentralization of authorization and automation of authority judgment. By analyzing the data characteristics within the agricultural product supply chain to avoid the malicious behavior of third-party agents, the decentralized blockchain system acts as a trusted third-party agent, and the proxy re-encryption is combined with symmetric encryption to improve the encryption efficiency. This ensures a efficient encryption process, making the system safe, transparent, and efficient. Finally, a prototype blockchain system for traceability of agricultural biological risk factors is built based on Hyperledger Fabric to verify this research method's reliability, security, and efficiency. The experimental results show that this research scheme's initial encryption, re-encryption, and decryption sessions exhibit lower computational overheads than traditional encryption methods. When the number of policies and the number of requests in the access control session is 100, the policy query latency is less than 400 ms, the request-response latency is slightly more than 360ms, and the data uploading throughput is 48.7 tx/s. The data query throughput is 81.8 tx/s, the system performance consumption is low and can meet the biological risk privacy protection needs of the agricultural supply chain. The BBPR-AC method proposed in this study provides ideas for achieving refined traceability management in the agricultural supply chain and promoting digital transformation in the agricultural industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]