AgriConnect: AI-Powered Smart Agriculture Marketplace

Agricultural trading faces challenges such as dependence on intermediaries, price uncertainty, limited market access, and difficulties in verifying crop quality. To address these issues, this paper proposes AgriConnect, an AI- and blockchain-based smart agricultural marketplace that connects farmers and buyers directly. The platform enables farmers to list crops and buyers to purchase products, compare prices, and communicate through voice calls, video calls, or a chatbot. A Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is proposed to detect visible crop quality defects using freshly captured images through the application's camera, without allowing gallery uploads for quality analysis. Random Forest Regression will estimate crop prices using historical market data and relevant crop, date, and location features, enabling comparisons between selected agricultural markets. Blockchain technology and smart contracts will support transparent digital agreements and tamper-evident transaction records. Product images and other large files will be stored off-chain where appropriate, while relevant verification hashes and transaction references may be recorded on-chain. The proposed system will be evaluated using precision, recall, F1-score, and a confusion matrix for quality classification, and Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), and R² for price prediction. AgriConnect aims to improve agricultural market transparency, support informed purchasing decisions, and reduce unnecessary intermediaries through the integration of artificial intelligence, direct communication, location-based price estimation, and blockchain technology. Actual system performance will be established through implementation and experimental testing.