5G Agriculture Proof of Concept in Washington State

  • February 3, 2021
  • William Payne

The 5G Open Innovation Lab has launched an application development field lab for the agricultural industry with dedicated access to a 5G-capable, CBRS LTE-based network and edge computing platform. An economic development initiative, the Food Resiliency Project in Snohomish County, Washington State, will serve as a proof of concept for the use of IoT and 5G in agriculture.

The Food Resiliency Project is funded by a grant through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act), and establishes a virtual and physical space for Snohomish County to bring together food growers, and distributors with technology companies to collaboratively develop new capabilities that will improve the resiliency of Snohomish County’s agriculture sector and minimise future food service disruptions for consumers and regional agribusiness.

Companies involved in the project in Washington State include Microsoft, T-Mobile, Nokia, Intel and VMware.

The foundation of the field lab is a dynamic testing platform with dedicated access to a 5G-capable, CBRS LTE private network through co-development access points. The two agriculture sites operating in Snohomish County are: Swans Trail Farms, a retail farm and event venue featuring apple orchards, strawberry fields, and a pumpkin patch; and Andrew’s Hay, Inc., a commercial grower and supplier of premium feed for horses, cattle, livestock and seed crops.

Each site will connect to an edge computing environment allowing developers to tap into cloud computing capabilities essential for latency-sensitive and compute-intensive applications. IoT applications include soil sensors measuring temperature, volumetric water content, oxygen levels and photosynthetic radiation, as well as supply chain and logistics tracking of food from farm-to-table to ensure safety and security.

The dynamic testing environment enables edge computing by using Dell servers based on Intel Xeon processors, VMware’s Telco Cloud Platform operating system for 5G applications and the Intel Smart Edge multi-access edge computing platform.

Wireless access is provided by T-Mobile with live radios connected to T-Mobile’s broadband network for Internet backhaul and access to Microsoft’s Azure hyperscale cloud infrastructure, and the Microsoft 5G-capable network core. Expeto, an alum of the 5G Open Innovation Lab programme, was selected to provide the wireless network core orchestration and end device (SIM) management platform.

Two of the initial partners leveraging the field lab to drive learnings and solution development with the installation of IoT sensors and advanced research are Washington State University and innova8.ag, another alum of the 5G Lab’s programme.

“Agricultural sites typically lack the high-speed Internet access necessary for connecting devices and generating the data growers and industry suppliers need to make real-time decisions for optimal impact. With the support of Snohomish County and our partners, we’ve proudly built an application development field lab with two dedicated sites through which our ecosystem members, partners, academia, and industry can collaborate to experiment, test, and learn. The outcome is the development of commercial use cases by way of research and innovation that agricultural vendors like John Deere and Cargill, for example, can use today,” said Jim Brisimitzis, General Partner of the 5G Open Innovation Lab.

“There are test beds across the United States and around the world, but they tend to be academic in nature. While they serve an important purpose, we wanted to design a dynamic, development platform that facilitates collaborative experimentation for commercially viable use cases. It is a true collaborative public-private environment for startups, with best-of-breed solutions delivering all the capabilities of a real enterprise platform,” said Brisimitzis.

“The Food Resiliency Project is an example of what can be accomplished using 5G technology, virtualised, cloud-native solutions, and the ecosystem of partners created by the 5G Open Innovation Lab,” said Sue Boyd, Microsoft Assistant General Counsel and 5G OI Lab board member. “The combined solution that includes a Microsoft 5G-capable network core, has been deployed in record time, and represents an invaluable collaboration between private and public domains that benefits the farmers, consumers and the environment.”

“The field lab we’ve rapidly built together to support smart agriculture use cases—leveraging analytics, IoT, and automation—is also designed to be easily adapted to other industries. Specifically, we are thrilled to offer our expertise in securing and managing the 5G and IoT network traffic and applicable applications to provide a more robust and secure edge infrastructure for the project to ensure a resilient and robust food supply chain,” said James Feger, VP and GM for Service Provider for F5.

Said Carol Miles, Interim Director, Washington State University’s Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center (WSU NWREC), “Our initial work in the 5G field lab will be focused on real-time sensing of in-field weather and soil attributes with remotely sensed crop physiological data products to guide informed irrigation management and precision chemical application decisions with the goal of improving produce quality and yield.”