North Dakota based agricultural education and research initiative Grand Farm, in partnership with Trilogy Networks and the Rural Cloud Initiative, has launched the FarmGrid Precision Agriculture Solution as a collaborative project on Grand Farm’s Innovation Site south of Fargo, North Dakota.

The project is the partnership of Trilogy Networks and their Rural Cloud Initiative members Microsoft, GenXComm, Veea, Intel, Dakota Carrier Network, along with North Dakota State University. This project intends to deliver an all-in-one solution for farmers to purchase precision agriculture equipment that integrates seamlessly on the Trilogy Network’s FarmGrid platform.

The collaboration allows for the addition of partners with technology such as sensors, autonomous systems, machines, ag-centric subscription-as-a-service applications and other farm technologies. The products integrated into the FarmGrid framework would ultimately enable the purchase of out-of-the-box solutions that integrate seamlessly on farms similar to residential digital systems on the market today.

The framework will be deployed this year on the Grand Farm Innovation Site and then expanded to key locations throughout North Dakota’s Agriculture Experiment Station to demonstrate the abilities of edge computing through private, farm-based, wireless solutions in multiple environments and across multiple uses. North Dakota Ag Experiment Station’s network of seven off-campus Research Extension Centres placed through-out the state present opportunities to demonstrate this framework.

Ranveer Chandra, CTO Agri-Food at Microsoft, said: “Connected solutions for farms today are fragmented making advanced AgTech solutions complex and expensive to implement. We are excited to partner with Trilogy Networks and Grand Farm in innovating on ways to bring the Edge processing capabilities of Trilogy’s FarmGrid with Data & AI of Azure FarmBeats and the Microsoft Airband program, to showcase the benefits of data-driven agriculture at the Grand Farm site.”

“One of the major challenges currently faced by farmers deploying precision agriculture equipment is that today’s network cannot support tomorrow’s equipment requirements,” said Brian Carroll, director of the Grand Farm Research and Education Initiative. “The FarmGrid Precision Agriculture Solution project allows us to research and test integrations on the FarmGrid platform and will position Grand Farm on the global stage as a true centre of excellence, innovation and collaboration for the AgTech industry.”

“This signature project will utilise Trilogy Networks’ FarmGrid, an end-to-end Farm-to-Cloud, Cloud-to-Farm enterprise grade solution with our LinX, ConEX, Edge and 5G wireless components” according to Nancy Shemwell, Chief Operating Officer, Trilogy Networks. “The project is designed to facilitate the application of edge computing and 5G on the farm with multiple precision agriculture technologies.”

Caroline Chan, VP and General Manager of the Network Business Incubation Division within Intel’s Network Platform Group says, “FarmGrid’s use of Intel’s Smart Edge Open for its multi-access edge computing capability accelerates development and commercialisation of agriculture use cases. Enabling on-site and regional cloud native deployments provides the required agility to quickly integrate new applications into farming solutions.”