Agriculture And Smart Farming Applications of 5G

Smart farming will proceed to grow as the world's cellular-connected infrastructure upgrades to 5G. Farmers can make more effective and efficient choices because of data and predictive analytics

FREMONT, CA: Smart farming and precision agriculture utilize technology to enhance the efficiency and productivity of the farm-to-market process. Smart agriculture, or ag-tech, connects all from irrigation systems to soil and animal production through IoT sensors. As 5G is extended globally, this high-speed cellular technology is collected to influence agriculture significantly.

The primary stages of 5G have concentrated on allowing high-speed communication. Before the widespread adoption of 5G infrastructure, focused farms will be the most feasible application. A main corporate farming operation may invest in a private 5G network to back high-bandwidth use cases—e.g., crop monitoring with drones and data aggregation from thousands of transactional or activated IoT sensors.

A central connection point assembles data from thermostats and feeding devices on an industrial chicken farm. Each of these thousands of sensors makes small amounts of data at a low cost or complexity level incompatible with a broadband-grade 5G data line.

5G is a perfect solution for aggregating and backhauling this data. When aggregated in properly sized clusters, the resulting bandwidth can be comparable to that of 5G mobile broadband. For the time being, 5G will be most beneficial when a farming operation extensively uses data from various sources.

The following are some instances of possible 5G use cases in smart agricultural technologies in the present and future:

Aggregating of Data: 5G technology has huge potential for centralizing data assembly in massive agricultural operations. A sizeable corporate farm could institute a private 5G network for aggregating micro-monitored crop management equipment data.

This network may allow a real-time monitoring system with triggers for irrigation and other crop support systems. These systems incorporate soil moisture sensor densities hundreds of times greater than those now supported.

Analytics Predictive: As 5G technology enables data aggregation, huge industrial farms may utilize predictive analytics more effectively. Analytics software develops models and forecasts according to historical and current data on circumstances—e.g., soil moisture and pesticide use to help farmers make decisions.

Because of the increased density of real-time data enabled by 5G, analytics will turn more exact, maximizing agricultural productivity and efficiency.

Operations Using Drones: Farmers are growingly utilizing drones to monitor their crops. Drones are more cost-effective than tractors and deliver more accurate data on crop damage and other aspects. 5G allows drones to record and transmit higher-quality video data. This high-speed data transfer capability allows the development of AI drone technology and real-time reporting.