Strapping a sensor on a dairy cow and learning what it does all day doesn’t sound too useful when you first hear this concept. However, it turns out that productivity is a real issue for farmers.

There are 1.5 billion cows on the planet and the milk they produce is a major staple of many diets. It is a fact, that by 2050 there will be over 9 billion people on the planet and food production needs to increase by 60% to sustain that. So, how are we going to feed everyone? How are we going to sustain the planet and ensure a stable future for the upcoming generations? Various AgTech companies are starting to work on a device that will be capable of tracking the daily activity of cows and other types of cattle using complex mathematics, which will help farmers tackle these pressing issues. In fact, it is estimated, that agriculture technology will use the entire basis of artificial intelligence to build smart tracking technologies. Essentially, we’re teaching our algorithms and giving them inputs about the behaviour of cows.

For example, we can detect problems that are related to eating and feeding disorders, we can know when it is the best time to get a cow pregnant and so on. However, farmers don’t want data. They don’t want to become analysts. They want to know what has gone wrong, why it happened and what they should do about it – all without directly learning how to use new AgTech. Challenge Advisory believes, that in the future world where sensors and artificial intelligence will be way superior to humans, helping the global population solve some of the most fundamental problems we are facing today, such as global food shortages and sustainability will require to adopt AgTech to its fullest extent.

Accelerated speed and automation is crucial

The biggest feature that the next generation of 5G internet connectivity will bring is the speed of data transferring across multiple IoT devices. According to our personal studies that were conducted here at Challenge Advisory, we’ve estimated that the global agriculture industry is responsible for meeting the requirement of growing 70% more food in the year 2050. In order to help professional growers overcome this challenge, speed and automation must be at the forefront of our focus and AgTech will surely help us come up with efficient solutions for that.

AgTech-based 5G solutions are already being implemented by various projects that are directly related to US agriculture. A good example of this would be a project called RuralFist – an initiative that successfully managed to fully plant and cultivate a small field of crops without the presence of a human. How did they manage to do that you might ask? Speed and automation that was achieved by utilizing 5G connectivity and AgTech. Various technologies were used, including autonomous and fully self-controlled tractors that planted the seeds, drones that took care of crop health monitoring and accurate weather forecast estimations and on-ground robots that harvested the crops at their final growth stages.

Conclusion:

The only way to maximize sustainability and farming efficiency, whilst still remaining eco-friendly enough in order not to deteriorate the soil is to fully utilize 5G based AgTech. This specific combination will help farmers become more sophisticated, allowing them to focus on their agriculture business and farm management while the heavy machinery does all the “heavy lifting” for them. By freeing the hands of farmers, they will have the luxury of being farm managers and not herd-watchers.