AgriSmart: A Decentralized MERN-Stack Marketplace for Crop Registration, Land Leasing, and Equipment Rental

Abstract

This paper presents the design and implementation of AgriSmart, a full-stack, decentralized web-based marketplace developed using the MERN stack (MongoDB, Express.js, React.js, Node.js) to resolve the financial and technological barriers in the agricultural sector. India\'s agricultural economy is largely driven by small and marginal farmers who lack access to modern machinery, transparent markets, and efficient land utilization mechanisms. AgriSmart addresses these challenges by integrating three core modules: an equipment rental marketplace, an agricultural land leasing portal, and a secure crop registration and MSP procurement system. The platform leverages the HTML5 Geolocation API for precise GPS-based farm mapping, native browser WebRTC media APIs for live crop photo verification, and Cloudinary for scalable cloud-based document and image storage. User authentication is secured using bcrypt hashing and JWT-based session management. The results demonstrate a highly responsive, fraud-resistant, and user-friendly ecosystem that empowers rural farming communities, reduces resource wastage, and creates new passive income streams for equipment and land owners.

Introduction

The text describes AgriSmart, a unified digital platform designed to address major inefficiencies in Indian agriculture, where over half of the rural population depends on farming. Most farmers are small or marginal and cannot afford expensive machinery, while existing equipment often remains underutilized. Additionally, unused farmland, middlemen exploitation, and lack of direct access to government procurement systems further reduce farmer income and efficiency.

AgriSmart is proposed as a decentralized, peer-to-peer agricultural marketplace built using the MERN stack. It integrates three key services into one system: equipment rental, land leasing, and secure crop registration for Minimum Support Price (MSP) procurement. The platform also uses GPS and live camera verification to prevent fraud and ensure authenticity.

The literature review shows that existing agricultural platforms provide partial solutions such as equipment rental or market access but lack integration, real-time tracking, land leasing, or secure verification systems. AgriSmart aims to combine all these features into a single unified ecosystem.

The problem statement highlights issues like high machinery costs, idle assets, unused land, middlemen exploitation, fraudulent crop registration, and the absence of a centralized agricultural platform.

The proposed system introduces modules such as crop registration with GPS and live image verification, ensuring transparency and preventing fake claims. Overall, AgriSmart aims to create a more efficient, transparent, and farmer-friendly digital agricultural ecosystem.

Conclusion

The AgriSmart project demonstrates that modern full-stack web technologies can be powerfully applied to solve longstanding structural inefficiencies in India\'s agricultural sector. By architecting a unified, decentralized marketplace on the MERN stack, the platform simultaneously addresses equipment inaccessibility, idle asset underutilization, middleman exploitation in crop procurement, and fraudulent government registrations. The integration of browser-native hardware APIs, specifically the HTML5 Geolocation API and WebRTC camera streams, represents a novel approach to ensuring data authenticity in agricultural reporting. The mandatory combination of GPS coordinate verification and live camera capture creates an authentication standard that is both technically robust and practically deployable for rural users with standard smartphones. AgriSmart establishes an important research precedent: browser-native hardware APIs can serve as legitimate anti-fraud mechanisms in government-linked digital services. This finding has implications beyond agriculture and could be applied to rural employment scheme attendance tracking, disaster relief assessments, and public works progress monitoring. In conclusion, AgriSmart successfully bridges the digital divide, offering rural farming communities a transparent, secure, and empowering digital tool. By connecting farmers directly to equipment, land, and government procurement channels through a single intuitive interface, the platform creates measurable economic value: reduced machinery costs for small farmers, new passive income streams for asset owners, and higher crop revenue through direct MSP access.

References

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Copyright

Copyright © 2026 Dr. Trupti Meshram, Mr. Abhay Patle, Ms. Asha Saroya, Mr. Anirudh Thekedar, Mr. Aniket Wanjari, Mr. Ankit Choudhari. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.