I recently saw a presentation by Professor Nicholas Uilk of South Dakota State University. He is the head of the first bachelor degree program in the country for Precision Agriculture. That program does just what the name suggests – they are teaching budding farmers how to use technology in farming to increase crop yields – and those technologies depend upon broadband.

Precision agriculture is investigating many different aspects of farming. Consider the following:

• There has been a lot of progress creating self-driving farm implements. These machines have been tested for a few years, but there are not a lot of farmers yet willing to set machines loose in the field without a driver in the cab. But the industry is heading towards the day when driverless farming will be an easily achievable reality.
• Smart devices have moved past tractors and now include things like automated planters, fertilizer spreaders, manure applicators, lime applicators, and tillage machines.
• The most data-intensive farming need is the creation of real-time variable rate maps of fields. Farmers can use smart tractors or drones to measure and map important variables that can affect a current crop like the relative amounts of key nutrients, moisture content, and the amount of organic matter in the soil. This mapping creates massive data files that are sent off-farm. Experts agronomists review the data and prepare a detailed plan to get the best yields from each part of the field. The problem farms have today is promptly getting the data to and from the experts. Without fast broadband, the time required to get these files to and from the experts renders the data unusable if the crop grows too large to allow machines to make the suggested changes.
• Farmers are measuring yields as they harvest so they can record exactly which parts of their fields produced the best results.
• SDSU is working with manufacturers to develop and test soil sensors that could wirelessly transmit real-time data on pH, soil moisture, soil temperature, and transpiration. These sensors are too expensive today to be practical – but the cost of sensors should drop over time.
• Research is being done to create low-cost sensors that can measure the health of individual plants.
• Using sensors for livestock is the most technologically advanced area and there are now dairy farms that measure almost everything imaginable about every milking cow. The sensors for monitoring pigs, chickens, and other food animals are also advanced.
• The smart farm today measures an immense amount of data on all aspects of running the business. This includes gathering data for non-crop parts of the business such as the performance of vehicles, buildings, and employees. The envisioned future is that sensors will be able to sense a problem in equipment and a send a replacement part before a working machine fails.
• One of the more interesting trends in farming is to record and report on every aspect of the food chain. When the whole country stopped eating romaine last year because of contamination at one farm, the industry has started to develop a process where each step of the production of crops is recorded, with the goal to report the history of food to the consumer. In the not-too-distant future, a consumer will be able to scan a package of lettuce and know where the crop was grown, how it was grown (organic) when it was picked, shipped and brought to the store. This all requires creating a blockchain with an immutable history of each crop, from farm to store.

The common thread of all of these developments in precision agriculture is the need for good broadband. Professor Uilk says that transmitting the detailed map scans for crop fields realistically requires 100 Mbps upload to get the files to and from the experts in a timely exchange. That means fiber to the farm.

A lot of the other applications require reliable wireless connections around the farm, and that implies a much better use of rural spectrum. Today the big cellular carriers buy the rights to most spectrum and then let it lie fallow in rural areas. We need to find a way to bring spectrum to the farm to take advantage of measuring sensors everywhere and for directing self-driving farm equipment.