Smart farming constitutes a key avenue through which operators can enable their customers to reduce emissions, yet many telcos have struggled to develop commercially viable solutions. This article outlines the challenges and ingredients for success in smart farming solutions.
Smart farming is a key avenue for telcos to help customers reduce their emissions
Most telcos committed to sustainable business practices have ambitions not only to reduce their own greenhouse gas emissions but to also enable their customers to reduce emissions as well; often referred to as the reduction of scope 4 emissions. As illustrated by our net-zero enablement use case directory, there is a wide range of channels through which telcos can reduce customer emissions, however few prove more critical to the planet than that of smart farming (see our article “What is smart farming and why is it relevant for telcos?).
Smart farming, or smart agriculture, refers to the use of advanced technologies to improve efficiencies in agricultural settings by way of improved monitoring, tracking, and analysis – see our article “What is smart farming and why is it relevant for telcos?”. There is an acute need for the development and adoption of these solutions given the delicate situation farms currently find themselves within.
Climate change is having a tangible effect on our ability to farm. According to the Asian Development Bank, climate change has reduced global agriculture productivity by 21% since 1961. This is matched by a loss of arable land, with recent research by the UN Environment Programme showing that 23 hectares of arable land are lost every minute to drought and desertification.
From a humanitarian perspective there is also significant impetus to increase agricultural efficiency. Research by UNICEF indicates that 783 million people faced hunger in 2022, yet a stark 13.2% of our global food supply is still lost as it transfers between harvest and retail (Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations).
Thus, there is an acute need for farming to become more efficient in use of finite resources, and smart farming solutions can play a significant role in achieving this. Indeed, given that these solutions typically leverage IoT, LP-WAN, 5G and AI, telcos are uniquely placed to provide them.
Signs of a poor harvest
An alarming trend we have identified however, is that several promising telco smart farming proof of concepts (POCs) appear to have lost momentum. These include:
- AT&T and WaterBit smart farming: A trial marrying AT&T’s IoT capabilities with WaterBit’s solar-powered irrigation solution to reduce water usage on farms – which AT&T estimated at 750,000 gallons a year across a 40 acre field.
- Proximus weed and pest control: As illustrated in Figure 1, Proximus trialled a solution leveraging 5G drones and AI to obtain a precise view of where pesticide is required on a field – which Proximus claims to reduce the use of pesticides by up to 80%.
While these POCs demonstrate real promise in driving enablement forward within their respective markets, and were shown to be technically feasible, there is clear hesitation from telcos in incorporating them into their service portfolio.
Figure 1: Proximus trialled using 5G-powered drones to optimise pesticide use
What are the challenges in commercialising smart farming solutions?
There are many distinct challenges in creating commercially viable smart farming solutions:
- Catering to the heterogeneity of agricultural environments. To gain commercial traction, smart farming solutions need to be able to cope with the different requirements of farmers across regions. This includes diverse farm sizes, diverse data sources, diverse equipment and diverse weather conditions.
- Overcoming rural connectivity. A key hurdle lies in the unsurprising fact that farms typically lack advanced connectivity. For example, the National Farmers’ Union found in 2022 that only 21% of UK farms receive reliable mobile signal in all outdoor locations on the farm. Likewise, a 2021 survey by Gravity found half of dairy farmers in New Zealand lacked access to broadband altogether. Although many farms are covered by LP-WAN networks, such as LTE-M and NB-IoT, there are clear limitations to what you can achieve with low bit rates. With the development of autonomous farming vehicles, such as John Deere’s autonomous 8R tractor, there is a growing need for high bandwidth, low-latency connectivity in agricultural areas.
- Creating the commercial case. Farming is a low-margin business that has faced significant turmoil in recent years owing to labour shortages, volatile commodity prices and the growing prevalence of extreme weather systems. Consequently, there is a fine balance in crafting smart farming solutions that meet the financial constraints of farmers while generating sufficient revenue to justify telco investment.
- Capturing farmer awareness. Traditionally, telcos have not extended their partnerships with farmers beyond providing basic connectivity services. Therefore, there are challenges in marketing and positioning telco smart farming solutions such that they can attract commercial attention.
Regulatory compliance. There are challenges in creating solutions that fully comply with the highly regulated environment of farms; telcos understand the challenges of navigating complex regulation all too well. For example, in the EU best practice smart farming software will abide to the EU code of conduct on agricultural data sharing.
Cultivating a viable smart farming solution
There are five core tenets that stand as fundamental to a compelling telco smart farming solution, as illustrated by Figure 2 below.
Figure 2: Five key tenets for a successful smart farming proposition
- Onboard farming expertise through acquisition and partnership. Telcos traditionally lack expertise in the farming sector and as such must find ways to onboard this knowledge. The success of TELUS Agriculture conveys how agricultural expertise can be onboarded through an ambitious acquisition strategy. Since its inception in 2017, TELUS Agriculture has acquired several specialist smart farming companies, including Farm at Hand, TKXS, Decisive Farming, Muddy Boots, AGIntegrated and Agrian. This has proven fruitful for TELUS with its Agriculture and Consumer Goods division generating $347 million in revenue in 2023.
- Embrace next-gen technologies. Although many modern farming techniques still resemble those used hundreds of years ago, there is a necessity to find areas where next-gen technologies can transform farming. For example, at MWC 2024, AWS showcased a collaboration with TELUS, illustrating how generative AI can help farmers locate, purchase and integrate suitable smart farming solutions based on their own personal requirements. Meanwhile, Intelsat has partnered with agricultural specialist, CNH, to demonstrate the power of non-terrestrial networks for smart farming.
- Leverage unique telco capabilities. Many solutions in the sphere of smart farming are providing farmers with new abilities to collect, aggregate and analyse farming data. Telcos are uniquely positioned to fulfil this role given their in-house expertise in IoT and analytics, combined with their access to granular customer-level data. This is a strategy embraced by Vodafone, which leveraged its significant investment in IoT to create MyFarmWeb, a cloud-based IoT platform with features such as microbial analysis of soil, pest detection, and scheduled irrigation systems.
- Create adaptable solutions. Farming is a highly diverse environment and, as such, successful commercial solutions must be built to accommodate a wide range of situations. With Azure Data Manager for Agriculture, Microsoft, in partnership with farming specialist Bayer, has created a data analytics platform that can aggregate data across a wide array of disparate sources, as shown in Figure 3. This platform has therefore been built with adaptability in mind, and Microsoft has also collaborated with eight system integrators, such as Headstorm and Tavant, to give farmers ample choice in how they decide to integrate it.
- Keep it simple for end users. Farming is a hugely complex job which new technology should help to simplify, not complicate. This is the approach taken by Trilogy Networks with its AgTech platform, FarmGrid, whereby farmers buy the applications they want, such as crop health monitoring, and Trilogy Networks takes care of deploying all the necessary infrastructure.
Figure 3: Microsoft has built its smart farming solution to be adaptable
What next?
STL Partners will continue to highlight best practice examples in telco enablement solutions through our net-zero enablement use case directory.
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