In a recent press release, John Deere announced an agreement with Starlink to provide broadband for smart farm equipment in areas where cellular coverage is not strong enough. Anybody familiar with rural America understands that there are gigantic holes in cellular coverage, so this arrangement puts Starlink in a strong position with farmers.
The decision means that John Deer will include a Starlink receiver in smart farm equipment along with a 4G LTE receiver. This technology will be available for both new and older Deere machines. They expect the satellite connectivity to be effective in the second half of 2024.
John Deere says that smart machines will first try to connect to LTE and then automatically roll over to Starlink as needed. This means that a farmer with a large property might be connected to LTE on one end of the property and to Starlink on the other. Today, the lack of 4G coverage makes it hard for this farmer to take full advantage of precision agriculture.
The press release doesn’t explain how farmers pay for the wireless broadband. My guess is that farmers must subscribe to the local cellular carrier and connect in the John Deere app. I envision that John Deere is paying for the satellite broadband and will bill farmers for the usage. A farmer doesn’t need connectivity all year long, just in those months when they are working in the fields.
The John Deere press release cites a lot of advantages to this new arrangement. They say that this finally enables full connectivity for all smart machines made by the company. Deere says that the broadband connection will enable technologies like autonomy, real-time data sharing, remote diagnostics, and machine-to-machine communications.
John Deere was recently recognized for its innovations with smart agriculture when it was awarded an honoree designation at the CES Innovation Awards this year. Smart farming equipment already contains a lot of technology. Machines are equipped with cameras and sensors that transmit information to John Deere through the AWS cloud. Critical data is processed in real time and sent back to farmers. Deere also provides mountains of analytical data on issues like the need for watering and fertilizing fields in specific locations.
Having guaranteed bandwidth will enable another big goal for John Deere. The company already has a few applications where smart machines can do tasks like plow and till field with no human driver. Deere has the goal to fully automate all steps of smart farming like tillage, planting, fertilizing and harvesting by 2030.
This arrangement does not solve the broadband needs for the farm operations outside of the smart machines. In my experience, farmers engaged in smart farming want as much broadband as they can get for their homes and farm offices. Many farmers already subscribe to Starlink, but they are the first in line to move to FWA cellular broadband or fiber when it becomes available at their location.
My consulting firm interviews a lot of farmers every year. One of the most interesting things we hear repeatedly is that farmers today often feel like they are IT guys as much as they are farmers. They utilize a lot of software to manage many aspects of the modern farming business.