Deutsche Telekom 5G helps vineyards collect data

  • September 11, 2024
  • Steve Rogerson

Deutsche Telekom has provided a smart vineyard project in the Moselle Valley in Germany with a 5G campus network to ensure real-time data evaluation.

The Moselle Valley in the district of Cochem-Zell is known for its almost 2000-year-old winegrowing tradition and the extremely steep slopes. So far, they have mainly been cultivated by hand. A shortage of skilled workers and the risk of accidents on the steep slopes are increasingly causing problems for winegrowers in the region.

The Smarter Weinberg project, funded by the Federal Ministry for Digital & Transport, has set itself the goal of preserving this cultural landscape with 5G-based digitisation and automation, and strengthening regional wineries.

Deutsche Telekom has equipped the smart vineyard with a 5G campus network. Together with an edge cloud provided in the project, the network serves as the basis for all digital applications. These are, for example, robotics, AI and image recognition.

A robot equipped with a 5G router drives automatically and self-controlled through the rows of vineyards and carries out time-consuming work such as soil cultivation or defoliation. The vines and their surroundings are recorded with cameras integrated on the robot.

Using the recorded data, cultivation equipment – such as a flat share for weed removal – can be controlled in real time. Information on foliage volume and density as well as pest infestation and ripening conditions can also be extracted from the data. A central platform enables the intelligent reuse of the collected data. The information obtained helps winegrowers make precise decisions to optimise the use of water, fertiliser and crop protection products. 

“Not much research has been done in the field of automation, especially for viticulture on steep slopes,” said Maria Wimmer, a professor at the University of Koblenz. “The robotics platform that we developed in the project brings automation to the vineyard. But for the automation to work, we need a powerful computer and a powerful network. And for that, a private 5G campus is indispensable.”

Kilian Franzen, winemaker at the Franzen winery Bremm, added: “The robot supports us especially with time-consuming and heavy work such as mulching or defoliation. With the time we have gained, we can use the few skilled workers we have sensibly in those places where manual work still cannot be replaced.”

The 5G network installed uses industrial frequencies from 3.7 to 3.8GHz licensed specifically for Weinberg. The industrial frequencies are allocated by the Federal Network Agency upon application. This makes it a purely private network that works independently of Deutsche Telekom’s public network. As a result, researchers, companies and winegrowers have exclusive access to over 100MHz of upload bandwidth for sensor data from the cameras.

In addition, the network is to be developed into a nomadic network in the future. This means it will move from one vineyard to the next vineyard for cultivation. In addition to the topographical challenges, one of the project’s specifications is that both robots and the grid are operated emission-free. Instead, an electric car that can supply electricity via the charging socket supplies the grid with energy.

“5G is revolutionising viticulture,” said Mathias Poeten from Deutsche Telekom (www.telekom.com). “Deutsche Telekom’s 5G campus network creates the basis for this and is specially tailored to the needs of the robot in the vineyard. With our innovation in container format, we can ensure that the network moves with the winegrowers in the future and thus ensures the best connectivity at all times.”

In addition to providing the basis for robotics applications, the network also serves to research the interference and propagation properties of signals from the 5G mobile radio spectrum in complex agricultural environments. The complex topography of the vineyards poses a particular challenge for the complete and uniform illumination of the relevant areas. The research will analyse how objects such as wire installations, plants and foliage affect the quality of 5G signal transmission.

The smart vineyard project (smarter-weinberg.de/en_US/home) focuses on the digitisation of viticulture in the area of steep and steep slopes in the Cochem-Zell wine-growing region on the Moselle. The project is coordinated by the University of Koblenz (www.uni-koblenz.de), and funded by the Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport (bmdv.bund.de).