TRACE-RICE: Linking Rice Field Data to Blockchain-Verified Labels
Here’s the case study at a glance:
TRACE-RICE (Tracing rice and valorizing side streams along the Mediterranean, with blockchain)
INIAV, Portugal’s National Institute for Agricultural and Veterinary Research, with GREEN-IT / ITQB NOVA
PRIMA Program (Grant No. 1934, 2019 call, Section 1 Agrofood), under Horizon 2020
10 partners across Portugal, Spain, and Egypt; coordinated by Carla Brites (INIAV)
Rice / agri-food supply chain
Portugal: Mondego Valley (2023) and the Tejo (Tagus) region (2024); producer partner Ernesto Morgado, S.A.
Rice Field Data Recording App built with ArcGIS Survey123 (Esri); consortium blockchain; QR codes on consumer packaging; IFAP plot-data integration
Pilot at the 2023 harvest; scaling at the 2024 harvest; findings published in Foods (MDPI), 2025
Showed a workable path from field-data capture to blockchain-verified, CAP-aligned labels; consumer engagement was modest (174 QR scans) and known scaling barriers remai
Rice is one of the world’s most traded staple foods, and one of the more adulterated. Origin mislabelling and quality fraud are common enough that the EU food-safety authority has flagged rice fraud as an emerging issue.
At the same time, the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy is pushing producers toward verifiable origin data and, for those claiming Integrated Production subsidies, a digital farm book to replace paper records. TRACE-RICE set out to meet both pressures with one system.
TRACE-RICE was a Mediterranean research project, funded by the PRIMA program under Horizon 2020, that ran a blockchain traceability pilot for rice grown in Portugal. Led by INIAV, it connected structured field data captured on a mobile app to blockchain-verified QR codes printed on retail packs.
The approach is worth studying because it is concrete and recent: the team published its design, results, and a frank assessment of the barriers in a 2025 paper, which makes it a credible reference rather than a vendor demo.
The Challenge: Origin You Can Prove, and a Paper Trail CAP Is Phasing Out
Rice supply chains are long and structurally fragmented. They run through smallholders, cooperatives, mills, exporters, and retailers, operating at very different levels of digital readiness, which makes origin hard to verify and fraud easy to hide. For premium and regional varieties, where buyers pay for provenance, mislabelling erodes both the price and the trust behind it.
The regulatory pressure has grown alongside the commercial one. The EU Common Agricultural Policy for 2023 to 2027 puts weight on product differentiation by quality, transparency of origin, and clear mapping of supply-chain actors. The sharpest change for producers is that those applying for subsidies under the Integrated Production certification scheme now have to keep a digital farm book in place of paper records, to make the data easier to reuse and report.
That leaves producers facing two linked demands: prove origin credibly to the market, and digitize their compliance records for CAP. Paper serves neither well. TRACE-RICE set out to answer both with a single act of field-data capture.
The Solution: One Field App, a Consortium Blockchain, and a Consumer QR
The pilot built a pipeline that carried a rice crop from the paddy to a verifiable label, with the field record at its center.
Capturing the field data with ArcGIS Survey123
The core of the system was a Rice Field Data Recording App built with ArcGIS Survey123, Esri’s field data collection tool.
Field agents and farmers used it to record agronomic practice, harvest dates, inputs, mechanical operations, and observations, structured to match the Integrated Production certification scheme so the same records served both farm management and compliance.
The form was adapted from an existing paper template and split into five sections, from plot identification through to harvest records and photographs.
Grounding it in real plots
To tie each record to an actual field, the app drew on plot geography from IFAP, Portugal’s agriculture and fisheries payment authority, whose public data layers cover crop type, land use, and plot boundaries for mainland Portugal.
Because no rice-specific dataset existed, the team built a Portuguese Rice Plot Database in ArcGIS and pre-loaded it, along with the European catalogue of rice varieties and the approved plant-protection treatments, so farmers chose from known options instead of typing free text.
The app was offered in Portuguese, English, Spanish, and Arabic to suit the project’s Portugal, Spain, and Egypt footprint.
Verifying it on a blockchain
Captured data were uploaded to a cloud platform, validated, and written to a consortium blockchain, a ledger maintained jointly by the supply-chain stakeholders rather than by a single owner.
Records were hashed and access was controlled, which gave the data an auditable, tamper-resistant history without exposing it to the open public.Â
Choosing a consortium chain over a fully public one traded maximum openness for faster processing and tighter control of sensitive commercial data.
Closing the loop with consumers
Finally, retail packs carried a QR code that linked to a blockchain-verified page. Scanning it showed the shopper a map of the specific plot the rice came from, with cultivation methods and quality information alongside.
In the 2023 pilot, run in the Mondego Valley with the rice producer Ernesto Morgado, S.A., this turned a bag of rice into something a buyer could trace back to the very field where it was grown.
The Results: A Working Pipeline with Modest Reach
The pilot proved the pipeline end to end. Structured field data flowed from the app, through validation, onto the blockchain, and out to a consumer-facing label, and digitizing the records improved their consistency and made field recording quicker than paper.
The 2024 harvest then tested whether the system could stretch: the team added Portugal’s new Caravela rice variety and three more plots in the Tejo region, and the system adapted without re-engineering, which is the main evidence that the approach can be replicated.
Consumer uptake was admittedly modest. Across the pilot the QR codes drew 174 scans, most of them in Lisbon. That is a useful signal about who engages and where, but it is a small number, and it shows that putting a verifiable label on a pack does not by itself create demand for it. What this means is that the traceability worked; what still remains to be built is the consumer pull.
The team was candid about what stands between a pilot and a sector-wide rollout. The barriers it named are the familiar ones for agri-food blockchain: the cost of implementation, interoperability with the systems producers and mills already run, reliable verification of the data going in, the uneven digital readiness of farmers across the Mediterranean, and a general reluctance among supply-chain partners to share commercial data.
None of these is a reason to avoid starting, but each one shapes how far a single pilot can reach.
Key Takeaways
The strongest lesson is that one field record can do more than one job at once. By matching the app to the Integrated Production scheme, TRACE-RICE made a single set of structured field data serve as farm management, CAP compliance, and the basis for a consumer claim. That dual purpose is what makes the data worth capturing well in the first place.
Verification matters more than the choice of chain. The value came from clean, plot-anchored data and a tamper-resistant record of it, not from any particular blockchain. A consortium ledger suited a commercial supply chain better than a fully public one, a reminder to pick the model that fits the data-sharing reality.
A label, however, is not the same as demand. The 174 scans show that verifiable provenance is only the starting point; someone still has to give shoppers a reason to look. The consumer-facing layer is a marketing job in its own right, separate from the traceability layer beneath it.
Ultimately, field data capture is the part that has to be right. Every barrier the project named, from interoperability to data-input verification to digital readiness, comes back to getting reliable, structured data out of the field and into a system other tools can use.
That capture step is the foundation, and it is where most of the practical effort goes.
How to Build CAP-Ready Field Records with VerusTrust Forms
TRACE-RICE used a geospatial stack (ArcGIS Survey123, ArcGIS Online, and a custom plot database) suited to a research project with GIS expertise on hand.
The underlying job, though, is one most producers and cooperatives face without that tooling: capture structured, plot-level field data that satisfies a compliance scheme, prove it has not been altered, and feed it to whatever sits downstream.
That is what VerusTrust Forms is built to do, with far less setup.
VerusTrust Forms lets you build a structured capture form that mirrors a certification scheme like Integrated Production, so a field agent records agronomic practice, inputs, mechanical operations, and harvest data in a guided form rather than free text.
What’s more, the AI Form Builder can draft that form from a plain-language description of the scheme, which removes much of the configuration work TRACE-RICE did by hand.
VerusTrust Forms can easily geotag every submission, tying each record to the plot it came from. TRACE-RICE had to assemble a custom rice-plot database to reach plot-level grounding; built-in GPS polygon capture gives you that anchoring directly, without building a geospatial layer first.
Rice is recorded in the field, and fields are not always in coverage. VerusTrust Forms captures offline and syncs when a connection returns, so a wet paddy with no signal neither interrupts the record nor pushes farmers back to paper.
VerusTrust Forms can anchor a cryptographic hash of each record to a public blockchain, giving the same kind of tamper-evidence TRACE-RICE used its consortium chain for: proof that a record existed and has not changed.
Your data stays encrypted on your account and only the fingerprint goes on-chain, so you get verifiability without publishing commercial detail, which is the same concern that led TRACE-RICE toward a permissioned model.
A rice chain runs through farmers, technicians, cooperatives, and buyers, and VerusTrust Forms controls who can submit, edit, and approve, keeping the record clean as it passes between them.
On the CAP angle specifically, the digital farm book that Integrated Production now expects is exactly this: structured, verifiable field records in place of paper.
Our companion guide on verifiable field data for EU agricultural compliance covers that requirement, and our blockchain traceability guide covers the anchoring side.
What Forms does not do
It is worth stating that VerusTrust Forms is a field data collection platform with verification, not a consumer-facing labelling or marketing product. It will not, on its own, build the QR-code storefront or the consumer engagement that TRACE-RICE found was the harder half.
What it does provide is the verified record underneath such a label, the part that has to be trustworthy before any consumer claim built on it means anything.
Start Building CAP-Compliant, Verifiable Blockchain Records with VerusTrust Forms
TRACE-RICE is a useful reference because it is specific and candid. It showed that structured field data, captured once and verified on a blockchain, can satisfy a compliance scheme and back a consumer claim at the same time, and it was honest that the consumer pull and the cost of scaling are still real work.
For producers facing the CAP’s shift to a digital farm book, the lesson is not to wait for a consumer storefront to justify the effort. The verifiable field record is valuable in itself: it is what compliance now expects, and what every transparency claim downstream is built on.
VerusTrust Forms exists to make that record straightforward to capture, prove, and reuse, with zero technical overhead.
You can start your own pilot program today. Design a form, capture data in the field, and anchor each submission to a public blockchain so anyone can verify it later.
Blockchain verification is included on every VerusTrust Forms plan, including the affordable Starter tier.