Cardano has achieved a rather impressive milestone in real-world adoption: 100,000 farms in India are now registered on the blockchain.

"100,000 farmlands in India are now registered on the Cardano blockchain," the Cardano Foundation said in its X post.

According to the Foundation, the project aims to get all agricultural data on-chain, providing a transparent and verifiable way to track farm data that can be reused across various services.

The announcement marks significant progress since June. Back then, the Foundation said that about 15,000 Indian farms were registered on the blockchain via the initiative.

Revolutionizing agriculture in India

The project, which was developed in collaboration with Syngenta Foundation India and a number of blockchain tech partners, aims to tackle a big issue for millions of Indian farmers: the lack of agricultural data.

The Cardano Foundation notes that over 100 million small farmers in India are not part of formal economies due to a lack of trusted and verifiable agricultural data.

The absence of credible information about land boundaries, crop history, and agricultural practices often means farmers cannot obtain much-needed financial services and insurance.

The 5am.earth initiative aims to solve that by utilizing satellite imagery, decentralized identifiers, and blockchain technology.

It provides each farm with a digital identity tied to verified land boundaries from satellite data. The project also includes historical data about agricultural practices, including biomass and crop history from up to 12 years.

Then, it anchors the verified data on the Cardano blockchain so that institutions that use the service can independently verify the agricultural data without needing to collect it again and again.

It's an infrastructure that aims to provide farmers with access to financial services while lowering verification costs for banks, insurance companies, and agribusinesses.

1 million farms next?

As the Cardano Foundation explained in its case study, the infrastructure is built in such a way that it could handle up to 1 million farms without requiring additional operating costs.

In addition, the project includes multiple prominent players in the Cardano ecosystem, like AIQUANT, Anastasia Labs, and Andamio.