Smart agriculture operations are benefitting significantly from the availability of satellite communications to underpin everything from crop monitoring to remote asset tracking and even automation of machines. Farms, by their nature, cover large areas and are often far from population centres. Therefore, cellular coverage can be patchy and fixed fibre infrastructure non-existent.
Satellite increasingly provides a viable alternative bringing high capacity, low latency networks to the industry, enabling a greater number of use cases than ever before. Traditionally, satellite communications may have been perceived to be too costly for all but the highest value farming applications but innovations in satellite technology have rapidly democratised access to satellite. Satellite specialists have reduced the costs of their services by optimising satellite design, launch and operation and enhanced their coverage by adding new constellations.
In addition, by combining satellite communication capabilities with cellular and other terrestrial alternatives, use cases can now rely on satellite only when necessary, utilising cheaper technologies where appropriate. The addressable footprint of smart agriculture applications has also increased, enabling economies of scale so a satellite gateway can support multiple use cases on a smart farm from low bandwidth crop or soil monitoring use cases through to supporting automated machines.
Efficiency opens up opportunities
Where once only high value assets such as combine harvesters would have utilised satellite communications, greater cost efficiency enabled by satellite operators has reduced costs and enabled optimisation of operations. Satellite communication doesn’t look expensive when offset against improved crop yields, predictive maintenance that increases machine uptime and service life, and enhanced efficiency across the entire farming operation.
At the same time, solutions that utilize local, wireless networks to aggregate data enable farmers to set up simple, plug and play private wireless networks that then utilize satellite coverage to enable long distance communication so data can be sent to the cloud for centralized processing. The ability to utilize short range wireless technologies to aggregate data from soil probes and other sensors before using a satellite gateway or node to communicate that data enables farmers to know the status of individual fields at a highly granular level. Data such as moisture, the need for fertiliser or the acidity level of soil can be collected, communicated and acted upon.
Source: iot-now