From smart farming to telemedicine, many future IoT applications will depend on a nationwide 5G network.

As a rule, potatoes are a welcome sight for farmers – unless, that is, they are growing in the middle of their sugar beet. Volunteers is a term used to describe, inter alia, plants from a previous year’s crop that survive the winter and grow unwanted among the newly sown successor crop. Traditional ways to deal with these intruders – pulling them out by hand or spraying them individually with chemicals – are labor- and time-intensive and not very sustainable. That is why, in Valthermond, a small town in the Netherlands, Wageningen University researchers have developed a new way to identify invasive potato plants in sugar beet fields and eliminate them automatically – with the aid of 5G.

CAMERA AND 5G COMBAT UNINVITED GUESTS

This is how it works. A robot vehicle equipped with a camera drives up and down the sugar beet field and transmits livestream to a Cloud-based computer in The Hague. The 5G network ensures fast transmission of the bandwidth-intensive video data. On the server a machine learning algorithm that has been trained to recognize potato and sugar beet plants takes over. If the AI identifies a potato plant it sends a signal to the robot telling it to spay herbicide on the plant. Thanks to 5G’s extremely low latency recognition and spraying are only milliseconds apart. Analysis takes up 90 percent of this time and data transmission a mere ten percent.

The result of field trials was that the robot successfully identified and sprayed 95 percent of the unwelcome potato plants, roughly the same success rate as that of a farm worker. The difference is that this unpopular task takes the farm worker 20 hours per hectare and the robot a mere three hours.

DIGITAL AGRICULTURE OF THE FUTURE

This practical example demonstrates the benefits that 5G mobile communications can deliver for agriculture when combined with the Internet of Things (IoT). Connected drones, sensors or vehicles collect data that an IoT module with a built-in SIM card or eSIM profile forwards for further processing. It takes mobile communications to make mobile uses of this kind possible. Other Smart Farming applications also benefit from digitization, the Cloud, the cellular network, IoT and 5G. Drones that spread seed, fertilizer and pesticides precisely can, for example, be controlled in real time and supplied with updates over the air via 5G, which also has the bandwidth and latency required for driverless combine harvesters, tractors and other agricultural vehicles and machinery. According to a Bitkom study four out of five farmers in Germany already use digital aids. One in three relies on smart, site-specific spreading of pesticides or fertilizers and ten percent of farms use drones.