How do 5G and Apps Help Farmers?
5G and Apps are touted as allowing farmers to produce more, spend less and protect the environment. But only if you’re big enough.
I work for a regional telecommunications company headquartered in Canada. I’ve been in the Telecom industry for over 30 years, and am familiar with the hype around generational change in communications technology, particularly in the evolution of wireless networks.
Given the rising concern about climate change, and the role that farmers can play in mitigating this change, technology vendors have combined this issue with the latest evolution in wireless technology to produce what they see as an attractive business case that will ‘revolutionize’ farming. In addition to 5G + Farming, other firms that have entered the application space to develop and sell digital tools to farmers to assist them in being more efficient in the production of their crops and in the management of their daily operations.
My experience told me that all the claims should be taken with a grain of salt. After seeing successive waves of promising advertorials and publicity during my career, and my keen interest in how farmers can grow better, healthier crops, I wanted to dig into the claims around how the combination of 5G and Applications could help farmers.
To reduce this to its essential element — how do these technologies influence what appears on my plate?
First, some basic information regarding 5G. At the risk of attracting a bevy of conspiracy theorists who will posit other theories, 5G is simply the latest evolutionary step in the provision of services using mobile wireless networks. With 5G, there are three main improvements as compared to current mobile wireless networks:
- Download speed. 5G promises to deliver much faster download speeds than the current mobile wireless network is capable of, between 2–3 times as fast;
- Latency. Latency is the measurement of time to transmit data from an end-point (mobile phone) to its destination. Usually measured in milliseconds, for current mobile wireless networks, that averages around 50 milliseconds. For 5G networks, this is expected to drop to around 5 milliseconds, and standards have been developed to make this as low as 1 millisecond (a claim that I find hard to swallow given the simple physics of distance, but maybe I’ll save that for another article); and
- Number of connected devices. The number of connected devices with any mobile wireless network is limited by the amount of spectrum available to carry the traffic and the requirement that all devices must communicate back to the network. As 5G operates cooperatively in three different spectrum bands, and the standards being produced allow for devices to communicate with each other without linking back to the network, it is expected that 5G networks will be able to accommodate many more connected devices in a particular geographic area.
In addition to 5G networks, Applications and other software packages are being developed to assist farmers with the management side of their operations. A significant part of farmers’ workload goes into managing their relationship with outside entities, whether governments, municipalities and suppliers. This is especially so given the increase in regulatory requirements governing what chemical inputs are permitted, when they can be applied, and where; predicting and managing insect loads on particular crops; assessing the effects of weather on crops; interchanging records between agronomists, farmers and government institutions; and evaluating productivity/acre or hectare — all of which contribute to the increasing demand from consumers and government for full traceability of foods from farm to store to plate.
Applications are something that we all know and love/hate, depending on our dedication to the information we seek from them. If you have a smart phone, you have Applications. Essentially, Applications are computer software that is designed to assist people in completing specific tasks. What’s made Applications particularly useful in recent years is their usability and narrow focus in performing very specific tasks, that tailors well to individual users and their particular needs and interests. Applications, coupled with Global Positioning System (GPS) capability, are particularly powerful when used in particular industries. Farming is one niche that has been less exploited than others, but this is changing, fast.
The reason for providing some basic information on both 5G and Applications is to examine how the two could be joined to provide specific functionality addressed to farmers. To this end, there is at least one company that is clearly doing this as part of their longer term growth strategy.
Telus Communications Inc. is a large telecommunications services provider in Canada that operates both a mobile wireless network and offers wireline connectivity services. One of their strategic goals is to leverage the potential of the Internet to deliver solutions to individual Canadians at home, in the workplace and on the move. One particular method for achieving this goal is to deliver integrated solutions for different market segments, which makes Telus more than just a provider of connectivity services.
For example, Telus Health is a division that provides a platform for clinics and physicians to digitize medical records, and make those records accessible on various devices as well as providing a vehicle to facilitate patient-doctor communication via the Internet. Since its formation in 1988, the company has since moved on to develop mobile clinics to be deployed rapidly — in association with local organizations — to different neighbourhoods to deal with specific health issues, or to provide specific health services where there is a demonstrated lack of coverage.
But of interest for this article is their recent creation of Telus Agriculture. Launched on November 12, 2020, Telus Agriculture is a new business unit of Telus Communications that aims to gather under one roof ‘innovative solutions to support the agriculture industry with connected technology’. The goal is to use a number of tools — either applications or dedicated software — that captures data on each step in the food production chain (farmers and ranchers, government, agri-business, agri-food, consumer goods and retail companies) to help farmers/ranchers streamline operations, improve food traceability, and provide consumers with fresher and healthier food. With the slate of companies purchased and aggregated under the Telus Agriculture banner, Telus claims that it ‘supports more than 100 million acres of agricultural land, backed by a team of more than 1,200 experts across Canada, the USA, Mexico, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Slovakia, Armenia, Germany, China, and Australia’.
The companies purchased by Telus include:
- AFS Technologies — Florida, USA — Comprised of AFS, Exceedra and Ignition, a global leader in supply chain management, and sales and distribution
- AGIntegrated — Pennsylvania, USA — Seamless API integration
- Agrian — California, USA — Unified management platform for precision, agronomy, sustainability, analytics, and compliance
- Decisive Farming — Alberta, Canada — Precision agronomy and farm management expertise
- Farm At Hand — British Columbia, Canada — Simplified farm management software
- Muddy Boots — Ross-on-Wye, United Kingdom — Farm-to-food traceability and supply chain management
- TKXS — North Carolina, USA — Custom data and program management
- Feedlot Health Management Solutions* — Alberta, Canada — Critical insights and data-based knowledge
In addition, they have also added a partnership with Hummingbird — a London, United Kingdom-based company involved in advanced imagery analytics.
In order to understand the linkage between communications infrastructure and Applications that are supposed to assist farmers in their principal task of growing and selling crops, Muddy Boots is a good example that illustrates how an application’s capabilities are linked with a robust communications infrastructure.
Muddy Boots has three main software applications — one for growers, another for quality management and a final one for supplier management. The first one — Greenlight Grower Management — is designed for farmers to manage their crops.
Available in both an iPad and iPhone app, the software is designed as a repository to allow agronomists, farmers and contractors to record and share field activity in real time. All the data gathered in the field is then saved automatically in a cloud infrastructure (read: a server in a data centre) so that all persons with access to the platform can view the latest information at any time.
For example, when an agronomist comes to inspect a particular field, they can record issues on the spot and even upload photos. That information is immediately available to the farmer, who can take action regarding any mitigation activity recommended by the agronomist that needs to be done, such as sending in a sprayer to take care of a particular insect or weed issue. For the person driving the sprayer tractor, an iPad in the cabin makes the same information available to the driver, allowing everyone to be ‘on the same page’ with regard to a particular issue. It also allows the farmer and the sprayer to pinpoint a location to conduct their mitigation, thereby saving on how much insecticide or herbicide they actually spray, and where. Finally, the mitigation plan can be checked for compliance with labour and regulatory conditions right in the field, as the plan is compared in real time to existing regulatory requirements.
Because the app is linked to the GPS system, the agronomist and farmer can easily return to the exact location of the problem after the fact, and determine if the mitigation plan was successful.
The benefits of such injecting such precision in agronomy and farming is the time savings for both the agronomist and the farmer. The agronomist doesn’t have to re-enter information he took note of in the field as its already in the app. The farmer doesn’t have to spend hours writing up plans in the evenings, as again, the plans already reside in the app. The app can also capture information related to the seed purchased and deployed in each field, how much and where fertiliser and any herbicide/pesticide were applied, note any inspections that were performed either by agronomists or others and note any field work and harvest operations that occurred throughout the growing season. All this information, in one place, which can help the farmer in having a more global and exact view on their farming operations, not just in one particular year, but over the span of many years thereby allowing the farmer to better track trends that will assist them in changing their farming strategy as conditions change.
What you may have picked up on the above description are the references to the ‘saved in the cloud’, and information ‘being instantly available across different devices’, and ‘checking for compliance in the field’. All of those activities are dependent on a mobile data network having excellent coverage on that farm and that’s where 5G comes in. If service providers can get towers and antennae into rural areas where the farms are, then these apps can be of benefit to the larger farming operations.
But there are challenges.
While 4G — or LTE — coverage is fairly universal throughout most population centres in Canada, there are coverage holes in wireless networks which can include highway corridors and rural and remote areas. Some farms are located close to urban areas, so wireless network coverage is not an issue. But many other farming operations are more remote or are near very low population centres where coverage is sub-standard, or in some cases, non-existent. The calculation done by service providers in considering the construction of network infrastructure relates to return on investment. If there are sufficient users who will pay for services, then a service provider will proceed with an investment. Absent anticipated revenues, most service providers are reluctant to invest. This is changing with the recent push to extend networks using funding from various levels of government to ensure 100% coverage of both wireline and wireless networks.
That said, coverage by the major Canadian wireless service providers — and SaskTel — in the Canadian Prairies is fairly robust. The flat topography makes it easier to extend coverage given the lack of natural barriers to the propagation of wireless signals. Compare any coverage map of British Columbia with Alberta or Saskatchewan, and you’ll see what I mean. Given the existing infrastructure supporting LTE wireless networks, it is logical that those service providers would re-use that infrastructure to mount 5G antennas, allowing the relatively fast deployment of a 5G network that covers a substantial number of farming communities and farming operations in Western Canada.
If service providers are successful in rolling out 5G networks with the same coverage as their 4G networks currently enjoy, then such higher speed, lower latency networks could be of benefit to farming operations in other ways. So-called ‘smart farming’ and ‘precision agriculture’ are based on the principles of solid coverage of a 5G network, the widespread availability of connected sensors in the field to gather data (weather, precipitation, temperature, humidity, soil health, soil absorption, etc.) and the availability of devices and applications that farmers can easily use that makes sense of all this data, such as the Muddy Boots application described above.
It’s clear to me that precision agriculture — leveraging the benefits of 5G networks and modern applications — is a niche that is suitable for larger farming operations, involved in the production of a few, uniform crops. The investment required for farmers in all the technology required to actually benefit from this technological leap is, at the moment, significant given that pricing for new technology is usually highest at the beginning of a particular technological cycle. When you add in the other types of technologies that are envisioned for precision agriculture — drones and automated harvesters, for example — the costs increase substantially, as does the dependency on an always-on 5G wireless network that will blanket the fields.
Worldwide, only 5% of farms are greater than 5 hectares in size. All the rest of the 460 million farms are smaller than that, with most around the 1 hectare size. Granted, there is a preponderance of smaller farms in developing countries, in China and in India. Farms in North America, on the other hand, are not shrinking but growing in size over time. In Canada, the average size of a farm has increased from 780 acres to 820 acres between 2011 and 2016 (315 to 330 hectares).
That said, the amount of land dedicated to agriculture in Canada has been relatively stable over the last few years (about 94 million acres, or 38 million hectares) but the amount of farmland dedicated to organic farming as increased from 1.49 million acres (570 thousand hectares) in 2006 to a little over 3.3 million acres (1.3 million hectares) in 2018. The number of crop producers using certified organic methods has increased from 3,400 in 2012 to 5,700 in 2018 (with the largest number of operations — 2,900 — in the province of Québec). Lastly, Canadians spent CDN$6.9 billion in 2020 on organic foods, representing about 3.2% of the total spend on food in Canada, with 66% of Canadian grocery shoppers choosing some organic foods in their weekly basket (all statistics in this paragraph from the Canada Organic Trade Association and Statistics Canada).
Given the changes happening in consumer buying habits, and the growth in smaller, intensive (multiple crops) farms dedicated to organic production methods (using little or no inputs, and relying on more natural methods of pest control, and fertilizer), the Telus Agriculture platform appears to be of little use to such producers. It is possible that the apps could be modified to serve this category of smaller farms with their particular circumstances, but time will tell whether or not the investment is within the ability of smaller farmers to absorb, and whether or not such applications are useful in helping them manage their farms better.
Outside of the Telus Agriculture platform, there are software packages that are more tailored for smaller farming operations. Many of these have similar functions as those acquired by Telus — management of records to ensure conformity with organic certification programs, labour and expense tracking, seed to harvest monitoring and tracking, farm mapping and planning, livestock and equipment tracking and the creation of electronic store-fronts to market products. Many of these are based on similar functionality as the Telus Agriculture products suite — either online or offline data capture, synchronization with a cloud infrastructure, and the ability to view on multiple device types.
Are 5G networks, coupled with applications and in-field sensors, the right approach in helping farmers better manage their operations and deliver better food to our tables? In my opinion, it’s too early to tell. Certainly, for larger operations, where exacting and close management of inputs are critical to the financial health of the farm, and the arrival of an invasive pest can wipe out a monocrop — and a farmer’s income — rapidly, such applications would be of great benefit. However, for smaller, more local, organic and intensive farming operations, where the dependency on chemical inputs is not as great, or nonexistent, other apps are available that focus on the more basic issues related to a particular farm’s operation, and the necessity and dependence on a highly available, high speed and low latency mobile wireless data network, is not critical.
For now, this technology appears to be aimed at a more affluent clientele, much like the Tesla, when it first was introduced, was aimed squarely at individuals with high incomes. The next few years will be interesting to see how this technology develops, and whether or not it includes smaller, intensive, organic operations as a target market, sold at price points that smaller operations can afford.
As for delivering better food to tables, that really depends. If the result is to deliver more of the same highly processed food items at a cheaper price, that’ll help the farmer, as well as the entire chain from farm, to processing plant, to grocery store. But as more and more evidence shows that highly processed foods contribute to a wide range of health problems, and as buying habits are changing to include more products from certified organic sources, the app developers will have to pivot to cultivate a whole new market with an entirely different set of requirements and needs. Maybe then we’ll see better, more affordable, healthier products that will be within the economic reach of wider range of consumers. That, truly, will be revolutionary.
