Agriculture 5G
5G is going to bring a disruptive change in speed and responsiveness of wireless networks. The new technology will enable wireless broadbands to transmit data over multigigabits and will offer latency of less than 1 millisecond which will be very advantageous in applications that require real-time feedback. 5G will give a new life to IoT devices which require much stronger and reliable networks than what we have today.
Use of sensors and AI in agriculture is getting more and more mainstream. New age companies are using advanced technologies such as drones and deep tech to solve problems that took days and costed a lot of money in a considerably lesser time and cost. With all these technologies connected with each other, agriculture will move towards much better precision and productivity.
On a highly advanced farm, multiple sensors can be deployed to check the conditions of soil, moisture, nutrient levels, and other vital factors. Multiple drones, connected with each other hovering over fields, can assess crop health using deep learning and cloud processing, and suggest proactive measures in real time. These drones can also spray fertilizers and other nutrients much more efficiently and effectively. Autonomous vehicles can then venture into the fields, visiting areas with weed growth and plucking them precisely, saving numerous costs on herbicides and also benefitting the environment. These vehicles can also plant and harvest on their own and work in close sync both day and night, drastically reducing time and costs. In warehouses, automated quality testing belts can assess and store the produce accordingly to its requirements.
On farms with livestock, sensors can be used to monitor movement and eating habits (5G enabled collars). Some farms in UK have customized the suction pressure in milking machines according to cows, which gets activated with the collar. Tail mounted sensors alert farmers when a calf is about to be born, helping in its safe birth and care.
Numerous tasks on farms can be executed without any human intervention with today’s technology, all possible with the push in network speed provided by 5G. all this is not just a technological innovation, but is an absolute necessity to feed the ever increasing population. This will not be feasible with the existing infrastructure.
It is true that all this is a thing of future, but this can be achieved only by converging all these technologies together and 5G is the first step towards that.
