IoT growing in agriculture, despite rural broadband challenges

Internet of things (IoT) technology is transforming how many Canadian farms operate — connecting, monitoring and analyzing data on everything from cows to soil to tractors. The technology is making inroads despite the lack of broadband connectivity in many rural areas of Canada, even as those internet connections become necessary for farm operations in a way they never were in the past. “The whole internet thing has just taken off on the farm,” Ron Bonnett, president of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, said in a phone interview. “The technology has actually been rapidly gobbled up by farmers when they see the economic advantage to using it.” Technologies adopted by farmers in the dairy industry include robotic milkers, and for crops, GPS mapping systems and tractors and combines that collect data in the field, as well as radar and long-range weather forecasts, he said. Telecoms are taking steps into the sector as well. According to a Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. report from May looking at IoT in agriculture around the world, the opportunity for telecoms in the market lies not only in connectivity but in additional services like “provisioning, authentication, security, billing, device management, location-based services, application enablement and analytic services.” It added that mobile operators “have significant strategic advantages in offering smart agriculture solutions: licensed spectrum holdings; extant physical infrastructure; and experience in the operation and maintenance of standard .” BCE Inc. recently announced funding for the University of Manitoba’s Innovations in Agriculture Program, which will develop IoT technologies “for application in agriculture and food services.” Bell also said it would launch a mobile network for IoT that will “play a key role” in that program. Rogers Communications Inc. partners with the Cambridge, Ont.-based blueRover Inc. to offer agricultural IoT services. Its CEO, Loreto Saccucci, said in a phone interview that agricultural IoT “is all to do with efficiencies of running an agricultural businesses.” For example, when it comes to a turkey farm, farmers need to know what the temperature of the barn is or whether enough water and feed is being dispensed, and IoT allows farmers to monitor these conditions on a smartphone and set up the system to do some things automatically. “If it’s to do with earth and crops, you’re measuring everything from nutrient content and moisture content, you can even look back years and see what kind of yield did I get from this acreage,” he said in a phone interview. When it comes to cattle, for example, a farmer can measure what kind of feed produces milk with a certain fat content, Saccucci said. IoT can also keep track of the animal’s health to see, for instance, if it’s laying down more than usual. “We have customers that monitor things like the silos, the location, what type of seed is in a silo, how fast it’s being consumed. They’re trying to prevent outage… and they can see tomorrow, I need to fill up my truck with this type of product and I can travel this distance and visit these farms, and when I come back the truck is absolutely empty,” he said. Bonnett noted newer, more sophisticated farm equipment have diagnostics that are done remotely, and that companies won’t install some equipment unless the farm has a high-speed wireless connection. That’s a challenge on some farms, given the long-standing problem of insufficient internet access in rural and remote areas of the country. The federal government’s ongoing Connecting Canadians program and the upcoming Connect to Innovate focus on improving service, while the CRTC established a $750 million fund to improve both wireless and wireline service in underserved communities in December. It also set a minimum of 50 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload speeds and LTE coverage in that decision, following a three-week hearing on broadband that looked at gaps in availability. Provincial governments also have initiatives of their own. Bonnett said the lack of broadband connectivity is a barrier to some technology adoption. “Because a lot of the bandwidth that is required, you need a very good internet connection to make it work. So that becomes a bit of an issue in rural areas.” The connections also need to keep up with rising demand for more speed. “There has been a lot of work that has been done in the last few years, but one of the problems is that as they get to one standard, all of a sudden you realize you need more broadband than what you had before,” he said. “On our farm right now we use just a stick wireless service that works over the cellphone, but the big deal is it’s expensive and it’s not quite as fast as what you would have if, say, you were on a ” The problem isn’t evenly distributed because access to adequate internet service is patchy, he noted. “A lot of it is very geographically-based. There might be some farms that have fairly good access and you might go just a few kilometres down the road and they wouldn’t have access.” Despite that challenge, adoption of new technology is growing fast, especially as farmers upgrade old equipment, Bonnett said. He added that “as complex as it seems, a lot of the products are fairly user-friendly … so you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to be able to operate . Sometimes the TV remote is harder to operate than some of the equipment that’s being sold now.” There’s also a generational aspect, as younger generations that are quick to use new tech take over farms, he said, noting “they see the opportunities to use it, and they’re comfortable using the technology as well.” Smaller farms are also likely to use new technology as the cost of it decreases, Bonnett added. Saccucci said IoT isn’t quite widespread, and that only a minority of farms have adopted the technology, but that the agricultural community is “quite more tech savvy than I thought they might have been.” “There’s lots of room for growth,” he said. As IoT grows, costs of the technology drop and it makes more economic sense for farmers to adopt it, he added. Saccucci also noted that a lack of internet connectivity on a farm doesn’t mean it can’t implement IoT technology, because the devices can use satellite connections. But independent telecom analyst Bill St. Arnaud noted in a phone interview that satellite is “always a fallback position,” given how limited it is terms of high costs and bandwidth. “Satellite has always been great for one to many,” like broadcasting TV, he said. “In this IoT space, you’re uploading data, and it’s one-to-one.” That means uploading data is a lot more expensive, there are delays and bandwidth is limited. “It will be part of the solution but I think it will always have a minor role,” he said. It might be the only option possible for very remote applications, such as measuring boreal forests, but “just where most of the farms are in southwestern Ontario and the prairies and so forth, I think there’s better opportunities if there was some competition and more bandwidth, particularly on the cellular side.” St. Arnaud said applications like sensors in the field that measure metrics like water, acidity and temperatures use very low-power networks running on WiFi. That information is then usually transmitted over a cellular (or sometimes landline) connection to a point like the farm, where it’s collected and analyzed. “And there many farmers really need access to large data sets and so forth and very high speeds,” he noted. “There’s challenges everywhere, but it’s mostly in the landline from the farm to the service provider and also from the cellphone coverage, which is usually very very spotty, from the node in the middle of the farm to the farmhouse,” St. Arnaud said. St. Arnaud said that areas that don’t have adequate service can’t make use of the new IoT technologies that are available. “The biggest gap right now is still from the farmhouse to the internet. Many farms have very limited access to very low speed, and just for checking prices and getting data and so forth. That’s still probably the biggest hurdle,” he said. “After that… from the farmhouse to the centre field. It’s going to be a while, I think, in Canada before we have the adequate cellphone coverage and cost to accommodate that.” The minimum standard of service necessary to take advantage of IoT depends on the technology involved, he said. Something like a network in a field with moisture sensors needs is less demanding than a technology that uses cameras or sophisticated sensors that need a lot of bandwidth, for example. “It depends on the value of the crops. A very high cash value crop — say, like marijuana — you want cameras out there. But if it’s a soybean crop, probably you just want moisture sensors, temperature sensors and acidity, and that’s a very low data rate. So it really depends on the product,” he said. Vineyards, for example, need high data rates because they have sophisticated sensors, he added. Robotic dairy farms or indoor pig farms need high bandwidth and sophisticated technology. “So it limits what things you can compete with and grow,” he said. St. Arnaud said the issues with connectivity make for a “major barrier.” “And I think it’s going to affect our ability to compete in a world market,” he said, noting that organic produce, for example, needs to be managed very precisely. Large factory farms, which have “huge data intensive requirements,” are also affected. IoT is “the big new wave of farming” and it “really helps productivity,” he said, adding that agriculture isn’t the only sector to be affected in this way — so are industries like forestry and mining that are also adopting these technologies. “Internet bandwidth is such a fundamental infrastructure, like roads, that those that don’t have it really can’t compete. They’re going to be really short-changed compared to the rest of the world,” he said. — With reporting by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca and editing by Ahmad Hathout at ahathout@thewirereport.ca

IoT growing in agriculture, despite rural broadband challenges

News | August 24, 2017

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IoT growing in agriculture, despite rural broadband challenges

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