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Hemp is a plant of growing importance to Oregon agriculture.  It can be used to make paper and rope, clothes, medicinal drugs, and more. The HempCheck project focuses on tracking hemp seeds using a new technology called Blockchain. You can see the live demo at hemp-check.com.

The HempCheck Capstone project is a proof of concept prototype for tracking hemp seed through the growing, certification, and distribution process. Hemp seed is especially valuable, running about $1 per seed and with lots of government restrictions. For example, if a hemp crop has a high concentration of the psychoactive chemical, THC,  then the entire crop is actually illegal and must be destroyed causing millions of dollars in losses. Because of this, and other regulations, tracking and testing the seeds is especially important.  Right now, hemp growers also face issues with dependability of their seed quality because there is no centralized entity for seed purchasers to see what they are buying. Blockchain is a promising technology for improving the reliability of this data because it allows many people to confirm information about the hemp seed.Our prototype includes three major components. First, we have the blockchain component which stores and verifies data between everyone who is adding data to the network. We are using an existing framework called Hyperledger Sawtooth which provides the core blockchain code to build the project. There is also a frontend component which is how users can actually interact with the blockchain by viewing different hemp crops and farms. There is one final layer called the Proxy API, which helps move information between the frontend website and the blockchain in a way they can both understand.