Smart agriculture and precision agriculture combine technology to increase efficiency and productivity from farm to market. Smart agriculture uses IoT sensors to connect everything from irrigation systems to soil and livestock production. With the global rollout of 5G, this high-bandwidth cellular technology promises to have a significant impact on agricultural technology.
Agricultural technology companies aim to maximize food yields by providing farmers with the data they need to make sound business decisions. Smart agriculture technology solutions help farms:
▲Reduce resource consumption (e.g., water, food, fertilizer, pesticides)
▲ Minimize runoff and soil erosion
▲Improve overall operational and product distribution efficiency
One example is Clover, a hydroponic farm in Bangalore, India. Clover uses wireless sensors to monitor crop growth in its greenhouses. Aggregating data from multiple locations allows them to improve their growing practices, resulting in healthier crops and bountiful harvests.
From orchards to cattle farms, farms are using IoT solutions to monitor multiple drivers that impact their profits, including:
▲Temperature
▲Soil conditions
▲ Pollutants
▲Water quality
Fixed and mobile applications may require cellular IoT connectivity to enable remote data collection and device management. These capabilities are analogous to monitoring a manufacturing environment that can oversee the entire process.
Today, some smart agriculture terminals rely on short-range wireless technologies such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Others use cellular mobile networks due to distance and radio frequency coverage requirements.
5G will support new applications and enhance or replace short-range applications. One example is using drones equipped with cameras to monitor crop growth and livestock health.
The Future of 5G and Smart Agriculture
The early stages of 5G focus on enabling high-bandwidth connectivity. Centralized farms will be the most practical use case before 5G infrastructure becomes more widespread. Large-scale agricultural operations may establish a dedicated 5G network to enable high-bandwidth usage scenarios (e.g., using drones for crop monitoring) and data aggregation from thousands of transactional or triggering IoT sensors.
Currently, 5G will play its greatest role when agricultural operations utilize massive amounts of data from diverse sources. In industrial chicken farms, data from thermostats and feeders arrive at a central connection point. For broadband 5G data pipelines, each of these thousands of sensors can generate small amounts of data with minimal cost and complexity. When aggregated in appropriately sized clusters, the resulting bandwidth can match that of 5G mobile broadband. 5G is an excellent solution for aggregating and backhauling this information.
We can expect 5G 3GPP Release (Rel) 17 to enable large-scale IoT within three to five years. Rel 17 will enable developers to leverage the standard of low-power devices running on 5G New Radio (NR) Radio Access Networks (RAN). When this happens, data aggregation on short-range radio technologies can be mitigated, as low-cost, low-power sensors can run on low-power 5G NR modems.
Over the next 5 to 10 years, lower LTE categories (i.e., NB-IoT and LTE-M) will play a dominant role in connectivity options for remote agricultural sensors. As technology advances, power requirements and costs will decrease, leading to new designs and concepts for remote agricultural sensors. With the development of 5G standards, the end-to-end capabilities of bridging technologies will become even more seamless.
5G Use Cases in Agriculture
Here are some potential current and future 5G use cases in smart agriculture technologies:
Data aggregation
5G technology holds immense promise for centralized data aggregation in large-scale agricultural operations. A large industrial farm could establish a proprietary 5G network to aggregate data from micro-monitoring crop management systems. These systems include clusters of soil moisture sensors, potentially hundreds of times denser than supported by existing technologies. This network enables more efficient real-time monitoring systems and triggers throttling irrigation and other crop support systems.
Predictive Analysis
Because 5G technology supports data aggregation, large industrial farms can better integrate predictive analytics. Taking into account past and present condition data (such as soil moisture and pesticide use), analytics software can create models and forecasts to help farmers make decisions. As 5G enables denser, real-time data, analytics will become more precise, maximizing farm yields and efficiency.
drones
More and more farmers are using drones to monitor their crops. Drones are less expensive than driving tractors through the fields and can provide more targeted information on crop damage and other variables. As a high-bandwidth technology, 5G will enable drones to collect higher-quality video data and transmit it faster. This high-speed data transmission capability will enable the development of AI-powered drone technology and real-time reporting.
Livestock tracking and monitoring
Before Rel 17 improves the feasibility of 5G low-power and denser sensor networks, livestock monitoring sensors will likely maintain connectivity via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or LTE LPWAN. One exception is in large, centralized farms where 5G infrastructure can be built over a small area (such as a chicken farm) to track individual animals. Agricultural technology developers have created herd management sensors, including smart collars and ear tags, to track livestock location and health.
Automatic agricultural vehicles
Autonomous vehicle technology, developed in other fields, will be applied to agricultural implements. Tractors equipped with onboard computers already allow operators to control minute details of tillage tasks (such as the distance between seed rows and the pressure applied to them during planting). Driverless farm equipment will be improved, providing farmers with greater flexibility and efficiency, and saving labor costs.
Trucks used for transporting agricultural products can also benefit from IoT sensors. These sensors can track cargo temperatures and issue alerts when temperatures are too high or too low (i.e., in the cold chain). Small mobile sensors, such as asset trackers, will likely continue to use high-latency technologies like LPWAN. 5G will enable autonomous vehicles with more powerful onboard computers to send and receive larger, ultra-low-latency data streams, including video.
Weather station
Agricultural operations are affected by the weather. Farmers can lose significant amounts of crops due to preventable diseases and damage. Field-connected weather stations can address this challenge by providing farmers with data on field conditions.
One example is the InField monitoring system developed by AMA Instruments. InField measures soil moisture and texture, air temperature, wind speed, and sunlight exposure. Weather stations deployed in remote areas may continue to use LPWAN connectivity in the near future. Later, they will benefit from 5G, as it will create even more data-intensive observations and edge computing.
As the cellular world transitions to 5G, smart agriculture will continue to evolve. Data and predictive analytics will enable farmers to make decisions that improve productivity and efficiency. The global outcome will be sustainable agricultural practices to feed a growing population.
