February 26, 2020 • 30 mins
In our increasingly “smart” and connected future, technological advancements will solve various issues facing the agriculture industry––from connectivity dead-zones and data collection to augmenting traditional farming skills and improving crop yield to meet the demand of a growing population. In this episode, we hear from Julian Sanchez, Director of Precision Agriculture at John Deere, about the tools and technology that will transform the efficiency of farming––Kirk Stueve, a farmer, and engineer with Ceres Imaging, a company that uses aerial photography to provide farmers with advanced crop data–– and George Kantor, a researcher and educator at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University where he and his team are working on autonomous and semi-autonomous farming robots. Make sure to check out other episodes in this series featuring: Irene Petrick, Senior Director of Industrial Innovation in the Internet of Things Group at Intel and Sean Petterson, founder of Strongarm Technologies.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
On last week's episode, we discussed new opportunities in the
future of manufacturing in a more connected future. We heard
from Irene Patrick, Senior director of Industrial Innovation in the
Internet of Things Group at Intel, Pat McCusker, CEO of
fast Radius, a company which is using three D printing
on an industrial scale to reimagine the supply chain, and
(00:25):
Sean Peterson, founder of strong Arm Technologies, a company using
data to help improve workers safety. One of the world's
oldest and most established industries is still changing and innovating
day after day. You know ever more connective future. The
(00:46):
way we cultivate our crops and livestock is modernizing and
becoming more and more precise. The next generation of wireless
innovation with future five G networks will create new opportunities
for more efficient farming and irrigation techniques with new ways
to gather and process data straight from the field. Thanks
to support from Teamobile, for Business Today will explore how
(01:07):
advancements in five G connectivity will enable innovations in the
agriculture industry that could shape the future of farming. Unlocking
the ability of farmers to make real time decisions is
(01:30):
really what makes the difference it's great that you could
see what you should have done a week later, but
it's really truly magical when you can make that decision
while there's an opportunity to still change whatever you need
to change to improve your practices or your decisions. That's
Julian Sanchez. He's Director of Precision Agriculture for the Intelligent
(01:52):
Solutions Group at John Deer, which is one of the
largest manufacturers of agricultural equipment in the world. Essentially, julian
job is to leverage new technology, including five G and
AI to make farming faster and more efficient. But what
exactly is precision agriculture. If you had a farmer that
decided I'm going to just grow one plant, and I'm
(02:16):
going to dedicate all of my resources at maximizing the
yield the output of that one plant, and guarantee you
that plant would do quite well. So just imagine this
farmer putting that plant in the best possible conditions, giving
it just the right nutrients and the right fertilizers, and
putting the seed in the ground exactly on the day
(02:36):
when it would maximize the amount of sun that plant
would get throughout the growing season. The objective of precision
agriculture is to try to enable farmers to farm hundreds
or thousands or tens of thousands of acres with that
same mentality. Precision agriculture is providing farmers with the technology
(02:57):
and the tools to allow them to do microman men
at scale where they're able to make the best possible
decisions that maximize the output of each individual plant. In
other words, the goal of precision of farming is to
allow farmers to give crops individual attention at scale, and
this can help better manage resources like water and minimize
(03:17):
the use of pesticides and fertilizers, and of course create
more value. You have a business that sometimes has pressures
of external pressures, whether it be whether whether it be
availability of labor, whether it be trade, and so a
farmer is always looking to make improvements to maximize their
margins and improve their productivity. When we look at technologies
(03:42):
like five G coming down the pipeline, the increased bandwidth
and the lower latencies have tremendous opportunities to unlock value
and the types of solutions that could be then rolled
out into market and put in the hands of farmers.
The value that Julian mentions is all about better understanding
how to optimize the food we grow. Modern day farming
(04:03):
already involves the use of computers, algorithms, and technology just
as much as it does tractors and soil. But as
wireless networks become faster and the infrastructure reaches further as
with the promise of future five gen networks, we can
expect the agricultural industry to become even more precise and efficient.
In this episode, we'll dive into the world of precision farming,
(04:25):
take a look at how censors and robotics can be
used in the field, and discussed how greater connectivity could
transform one of the world's oldest industries. I'm as Lachen
this is This Time Tomorrow. So cart before this series,
when I thought about farming, technology wasn't the first place
(04:45):
my mind would go, Oh really, because I think tractors
are the original Tesla's actually all right, And in the
very first episode of This Time Tomorrow, we spoke to
Durga Malady of Qualcom and he said that agriculture is
an area that he's most excited out five G transforming. Yeah,
I mean, if you think about it, there's just so
much data to collect from farms. You know, first of all,
(05:07):
they often span huge geographical areas, and there are all
kinds of equipment needed to tend to crops. You tractors,
combine harvesters, irrigation systems. I know a lot about this,
and the promise of future five G networks is all
about gathering data from more sources, combining it, analyzing it,
and making recommendations in real time. We've looked at everything
(05:28):
from fashion to auto to manufacturing, and there's absolutely no
reason that agriculture should be any different. Right. We've covered
all those topics on this time tomorrow and this is
sadly our last episode of this season. One of the
big challenges in five G, though, is access. Farmlands are
often very large and sparsely populated, which has made it
challenging to network them. Some people believe five SHE could
(05:51):
actually play a role though, in solving that. Late last year,
the SEC announced a nine billion dollar fund for five
D development in rural areas that Ammon said, we must
ensure that FIG narrows rather than widens, the digital divide,
and that rural Americans received the benefits that come from
what is innovation, and actually billion dollars of that fund
(06:11):
has been a marks specifically for precision agriculture. I'm a
New Yorker, so I've never actually seen a real farm before,
but no, in all seriousness, precision farming was a new
concept for me, but it actually reminds me of many
other topics we've discussed on this show. Data and higher
bandwidth could allow for unprecedented specificity in manufacturing in the
(06:34):
automobile industry, and in this episode, I spoke with a
guy named Kirk Stevie who is a farmer in western
Minnesota and also an engineer by he is and Kirk
is working with Series Imaging, a company that uses aerial
photos and videos to provide farmers with information like whether
or not a plant has been watered enough and if
it's at risk for developing a disease. You mentioned tractors
(06:57):
and Tesla's since tractors, the advancements and every cultural machinery
are pretty amazing. And for this episode, I spoke with
George Cantor, who is a robotics professor at Connigie Mellon
and he and his team are building robots that work
autonomously or semi autonomously on farms. Before we get to George, though,
I want to go back to Julian Sanchez of John Deer.
(07:19):
There's something really really exciting about agriculture. You know, ultimately
it's a space that at a at a macro level,
it matters, right, So all the crabs being grown out
there ultimately resolved in the food we eat. In some
cases they result in many of the products that are
key to our society. Ensuring that we have a productive
and healthy food supply is essential, but so is protecting
(07:42):
our environment. Many believe that incorporating technology can help the
agricultural industry reduce its environmental footprint by being more efficient,
and that's where collecting and analyzing data can play such
an important role. One of the things that John Deere
has done in terms of rolling out tools and technologies
that help farmers adopt and embrace this idea of precision
(08:05):
agriculture is everything from putting the right sensors in the
machines so that the machines can sense where each seat
is being placed, how much fertilizer, how many nutrients are
being applied to each plant, and then at the end
of the season also sends what the yield of your
crops were, and so putting all of those sensors in
(08:28):
the machines, but then giving the farmers the ability to
transmit all of that data to a platform where they
can easily view it, they can easily analyze it, they
can share that data with their trusted advisors, and then
make better decisions for the next growing season. We are
in the age of big data, and agriculture is no exception.
(08:48):
But in order to transmit that data, farmers need connectivity,
which in rural areas is often lacking or incomplete. So
today farmers will in some cases be on the phone
with operators that are in the vehicles and saying, hey,
what are you seeing right now? Is the vehicle performing
the way it's supposed to? Are we seeing what we
expected out of the crops? And essentially in real time
(09:11):
sending instructions to operators about what to do. Today, farmers
share important data on the phone. Tomorrow, the promise of
future five gene networks is to collect and share that
data in real time, automatically and even directly to machines.
If we thought about a world in which you had
in rural America full coverage with no death spots that unlocked,
(09:35):
you know less than one second real time connectivity that
would have a tremendous impact on farmers. Farming is a
real time business where having the most recent data and
when I say recent, yes within the last five seconds
of what is happening in a vehicle and what kind
of performance you're getting out of the vehicle and doing
(09:56):
the job. Having that information at your fingertips in real
time allows you to make the necessary adjustments that really
ultimately impact your bottom line. And with AI, some of
these key decisions that need to take place in real
time can be made without human input. One of my
my favorite examples is a harvesting combine. Is the vehicle
(10:20):
you used to go through the field at the end
of the season and harvest the crops. This is essentially
a factory on wheels where conditions are changing literally by
the second. It's a tremendously difficult job. And our harvesting
combines are equipped with an artificial intelligence system that continuously
(10:40):
takes images of the crop that is going through the
machine as the machine tries to separate essentially the grain
from the rest of the plant and you know, just
hold onto the grain. It's using a convolutional neural network
to make decisions as to whether the grain samples are
the right quality, and it's automatically making a just ments
to this factory on wheels so that it can maintain
(11:03):
its optimal performance. We've seen already on this time tomorrow
how AI and five G can come together to deliver
on the promise of the Internet of things, connected devices
talking to one another as they monitor their environment to
optimize decisions. This could be particularly useful for farmers because
they're constantly dealing with highly variable processes and environments. Farming
(11:27):
is a domain where every inch of every field across
the world is different from the inch of field that's
right next to it. It might be the soil that's different,
it might be the topography, the micro topography of that field,
where the inch next to the other one gets a
(11:47):
little bit less water, and so all of a sudden,
when you start looking at the opportunity and agriculture to
try to get your arms around all of that variability
and help farmers maximize how they do their job. What's
exciting and the reason I wake up every morning is
that I feel like, despite the tremendous progress that has
(12:07):
been made in the industry, we are really really just
at the beginning of the journey and unlocking all of
that value. And I was curious about how Julian is
planning to leverage five G to help execute his vision
of the future of filming. Five G is an infrastructure
if it can help reduce or hopefully eliminate some of
(12:28):
the prevalent dark spots and connectivity. All of a sudden,
you can really imagine having solutions that are truly trying
to execute sort of coordinated logistics activities, coordinated semi autonomous
and fully autonomous operations in the fields by leveraging low latency,
high bandwidth five G solutions. While that's possible right now,
(12:52):
they exist in a in a very localized manner because
you cannot be relying on full coverage and connectivity to
be able to transmit data through a cloud. Garrot does
a factory on wheels that can readjust itself based on
images that it's taking in real time. Impress you. Steven
(13:13):
Spielberg made a movie, one of his first movies, I think,
was about a truck that went wrong, A bad a
bad truck. Hopefully the trucks will go right exactly. I
mean that I hope it's not that situation, but that's
sort of what this reminds me of. But I also know,
you know, much like having a warehouse in the cloud,
that these sort of things are the future in their
(13:35):
given industries. Absolutely, and the future is closer than we think.
I mean, people often ask how close are we to
the robotics revolution. Many ways, it's already arrived. Robots are
machines that make decisions for themselves, and that's exactly what
Julian was describing with that combine harvest. Yeah, and we
know from some of our previous episodes that future five
G networks could really support the expansion of robotics because
(13:58):
these moving robots will be able to connect to a
network that allows for really fast processing. Right. And despite
all the machinery built by John Deer and others, farming
remains one of the most labor intensive industries in the world.
There's so many tasks like picking fruit, to name just one,
that rely on people. And according to a California Farm
Bureau survey, I've also done my homework more than farmers
(14:21):
in the past five years have been unable to obtain
all the workers they need for the production of their
main crop. At the same time, growing populations and changing
climate is putting new pressure on food production, and these
are issues that George Cantor spends a lot of time
thinking about. First of all, everybody eats, so this touches
(14:43):
everyone on the planet. When you look at the way
food is produced now, we have several very serious challenges.
The rate at which we are increasing yields is not
high enough to meet the rate at which we are
increasing people. Climate change is changing the way agriculture real
production is done. It's making some regions more productive, it's
making other regions less productive. We're starting to grasp the
(15:06):
implications of our sort of highly chemical driven agricultural system.
It's a very big, complicated problem, and I think technology
can be part of the solution of that problem. According
to George, much of the solution relies on giving farmers
better information that people who grow plants for a living,
the more they know about the status of those plants,
(15:28):
the better they can do at making decisions that help
grow the plants. So, for example, when do apply fertilizer,
when to apply pesticide in a way that maximizes your
crop growth but at the same time minimizes the environment
impact that that decision might have. George is a robotics
researcher at Carnegie Mellon. Alongside better information, he's interested in
(15:50):
giving farmers better tools to leverage it. He and his
team are building robots designed to do jobs traditionally handled
by people, and despite concerns about displacing a labor, George
believes this automation is necessary. Some of the industries United States,
like apples and grapes, rely heavily on manual labor. It's
a terrible job, it's tedious, the environmental conditions are really rough,
(16:14):
and they're just having a very difficult time finding people
to do this work. And so they're very interested in
automating some of the things that people do currently. They
are difficult to automate because they require really intricate manipulation
with the environment. You know, if you if you pick
an apple off a tree, you have to grab it
just so, and you have to pull it off just so.
(16:35):
Sometimes you have to reach around branches and push things
out of the way, and robotics isn'to that state yet,
but that's that's where we're going. We're moving into manipulation
and touching plants, tackling problems like pruning and harvesting and
weeding and things like that. That's been our holy grail
for a while. In order for robots to be able
to accurately and effectively manipulate their environment, they need to
(16:58):
be able to sense it, which is something George has
been working on for more than a decade. I'm interested
in sensing the plants and inferring what their health is
from whatever it is we can sense. We can never
sense directly the things we want to sense, the things
we really want to sense, or things like what's going
on inside the leave for how is the water status
(17:18):
in the stem? We can't sense those things directly. This
process of taking things like camera images or local environmental
readings or whatever it is we can measure and using
that to infer what's going on inside the plant is
I think really interesting. And we've been spending the last
fifteen years on the sensing side of things. Sensing and modeling.
You take measurements and then you build up a model
(17:38):
of what you're looking at and you reason about what's there.
We've gotten really good at it, and so now it's
time to build upon that and move into the actually
reaching out and making the cut side of things. And
that's why you know, we're moving into the manipulation in
the agriculture space for sure. In George's vision, sensing and
manipulation powered by data connectivity and pros saying come together
(18:01):
to enable the vision for precision farming at scale and
improve outcomes for farmers. Some people consider precision farming as
making decisions at the scale of blocks that are tens
of acres. Some people consider precision farming to be making
decisions at the scale of individual plants. But basically it
(18:21):
means tailoring your treatment to the specific environment and plant
status at wherever it is you're applying that treatment. The
old way, the non precision way to farm, is just
to plant the same thing everywhere in the field and
treat it the same way throughout the course of the
growing season. But if you were to instead, you know,
(18:41):
take what you know about that field and break it
up into smaller areas where you have different microclimates and
maybe there's a different slope or the the sun is
coming in from a different direction, and then adapt what
you plant and how you treat it after you plant
it based on those factors that that becomes precision farming.
(19:01):
Five G capabilities are still improving, but the abasity to
connect to low latency, high bandwidth mobile internet could transform agriculture.
The flip side is that right now, a lot of
the environments we work in they don't even have any
cellular at all. Forget about four G or even three
G or even one X like they have nothing, and
(19:24):
so if they're not going to cover those areas, then
it's not going to have the impact that it could
have Without the connectivity. The things you can do, how
far you can go with precision agriculture is limited, and
the more you know about what's going on in the plants,
the better you can grow stuff. The biggest barrier right
now to getting that information is not sensing it. We've
(19:44):
got great sensor technologies, it's transmitting it to wherever it
needs to be. And so that's one thing that I
think five G has the potential to have a big
impact on the future. With five G is coming today,
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(20:04):
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(20:26):
T Mobile for Business knows that the future of business
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Mobile for Business dot com. To Garrett, George underlined the
importance of delivering five G to rural areas, which in
(20:49):
some cases don't even have three G today. Policymakers and
telcos are aware of that challenge and taking steps to
address it. The other Teain George mentioned that policymakers are
thinking of about what should be thinking about is how
new technologies can change the labor market, in some cases
making sudden kinds of jobs obsolete, although the George points
(21:09):
out many agricultural jobs are desirable and difficult to fill. Yeah,
we can't think of technology and a vacuum, though, we
need to think about the political and social consequences early
on in the process of building this technology out. But
on the other side of that, I think precision farming
could change the lifestyle for farmers for the better by
giving them the ability to keep eyes on their farm
(21:32):
without having to literally walk in the field, you know.
I spoke about this with Kirk Stevie, who is a
farmer and researcher who recently took over his family farm.
I like to say, I'm I'm part farmer and I'm
part geek. My farm with my family in western Minnesota,
(21:53):
where you run corn and soybeans and um. Also I
work as a research scientist and precision anymous the geek
part of Kirk works with the company based out of
California called Series Imaging that provides tools for precision farming,
but he also spends a lot of time on his
family farm. I live four hours from the farm, and
(22:13):
so I usually go stay out there with my uncle
Mark and aunt Becky that I farm with, and stay
for two three weeks. And so when I'm out there,
we're going hard. We're waking up before dawn and grabbing
a bite to eat, and then we're going and jumping
in the tractors to to plant or to harvest and
putting in sixteen seventeen eighteen hour days. We're planting beans,
(22:36):
were planting corn, dealing with fertilizer and machinery and so forth.
I was curious what has changed most since Kirk's grandfather
ran the family farm. What's really changed is every piece
of equipment it has a computer in it. And so
for most modern farms, they have a computer that says
powerful or more powerful than you know your regular desktop
(22:58):
or laptop computer sitting right in the h and so
you've got to know a lot about computers, GPS, and
you know, tying some of that technology to your traditional
machinery and what your classical farmers know and do well
to succeed in agriculture. The traditional skills of farming that
have been honed over thousands of years are not going anywhere.
But what is changing is the ability to leverage new
(23:20):
technologies like AI and five G to augment those skills.
In that sense, Kirk, the self described part geek, part farmer,
might be what the future looks like. As well as
working on his family farm, Kirk is a remote sensing
scientist with Series Imaging, a company that specializes in providing
high quality aerial images of farms to inform decision making.
(23:43):
I was integrating satellite data and imagery into the farming
operation already, but looking for alternatives, and that led me
to series where I was finding that they really had
a science driven product with next gen technology that I
wanted to integrate on the farm eries. Cameras can see
that water stress where an irrigation device is not functioning
(24:04):
properly fourteen days before you can see it with your
eyes at least, and so that allows the growers a
chance to correct it and respond. They can get a
sense that they're putting too much water on, not enough,
or if there are issues, and so really it ties
into conserving water, which is obviously outstanding, but obviously it
saves the grower money as well. Our cameras are custom built,
(24:27):
so they're sensitive to different parts of the spectrum um
thermal imaging being one. When plants aren't having enough water
put on them and they start a defense mechanism where
there's stamata close up and that heats up the canopy
and we can pick that up with our thermal cameras.
Stomata are tiny openings in the plant that allow for
the intake of carbon dioxide and release of other vapors
(24:50):
like water and oxygen. The human eye would be unable
to see if these stomata were open or closed, but
thermal imaging from above can trace their heat pattern and
then indicate to a farmer that they need to water
a specific patch of crops before it's too late. This
is precision farming in action. Certainly growers, they're very accustomed
(25:11):
to seeing that variability in the field. The tricky part
is how do we quantify that very precisely and deliver
it in a format to attractor so it can act
and do something with it. Uh that's where we can
show value. And so we have a network of pilots
that have apps in the fields built right in, and
so they'll have a flight plan that we've custom designed,
(25:33):
and those pilots go up and execute and fly the
fields based off the flight plan in this app, collect
all the data and loaded up to the cloud where
it's kicked to our processing team on the backside out
in California, and then within twenty four hours, the grower,
the agronomous what have you. They can view this imagery
(25:54):
on their smartphones while they're walking the fields, and so
it's very close to having instant access to a broad
scale field data. Twenty four to forty eight hours may
not seem like a long time, but to a crop
needing water, it can make a huge difference. So one
of the things that makes Kirk most excited about the
future is the ability to collect, process, and serve that
(26:14):
data to farmers in real time. This is something Kirk
hopes five G will make possible. Right now. You know,
we deliver our imagery just for even a visual observation
if a grower wants to look at it right now.
With the existing network, even at that level, there are obstacles.
You can't even see your data on a phone on
(26:34):
many fields, and so if five G was ubiquitous, I
mean that would mean instant access after the data is
collected from your field, you know, you wouldn't have any issues.
Not only could you look at it and make a
qualitative decision about scouting, you can also obviously sink it
up instantly with your equipment for action. And so when
we have that more seamless and efficient loop, that's going
(26:57):
to make it even better. Available now from my Heart,
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Ones join host Johnathon Strickland as he explores the upcoming
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on the cutting edge. There are certain decision makers who
(27:19):
are restless they know there is a better way to
get things done, and they're ready, curious and excited for
the next technological innovation to unlock their vision of the future.
These Restless Ones are in pursuit of bigger, better, smarter, stronger.
They seek new partners, new strategies, new processes. They pursue
(27:39):
innovative platforms and solutions to propel their teams, businesses, and
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Restless Ones themselves and dive deep into how they think
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Restless Ones is now available on the I Heart Radio
app or wherever you listen to podcasts. So, Carol, we
(28:06):
live in a city, New York City, the Big Apple,
and unless we're on the subway or in an elevator,
we usually have some kind of access to a WISE network.
But for rural America where they grow the Apples, it
can be quite a different experience. Yeah, there are areas
that just don't have the infrastructure for mobile broadband, but
five G has such promising potential for agriculture, so it
(28:29):
will be crucial to make sure it is widely deployed
to allow for all the amazing future applications we have
discussed in this episode. Well, that wraps up this series
of This Time Tomorrow. It's been fun, it has and
it's a good way of thinking about the future. It is.
You brought up this concept of the adjacent possible in
the first episode, and we spent the last eight episodes
(28:52):
exploring what that might look like in all kinds of
different industries. We started off in Silicon Valley with some
researchers who were key to building the technology G that
underlies five G. We spoke with a NASA scientist, local
officials trying to improve their communities, researchers, roboticists, and of
course business leaders. And it's clear that although we don't
know exactly when and how five G will transform key industries,
(29:15):
the next generation of wireless has the potential to be
even more transformative than the jump from those old Nokia
phones to our beloved smartphones. Yeah, and as Paul Dillinger,
who you'll remember is the head of global Product Innovation
at Levi's, said in our episode on the future of retail,
we don't know what the future will look like, but
we know it will be different than today and it
(29:35):
will be really interesting. To see how wireless networks change
standards for businesses and consumers in the coming years. As
five G moves from the building phase to the here
and now, as this time tomorrow becomes today, We'll see
you there. This maybe the end of season one, but
(29:55):
we're not finished yet with this conversation. Stay tuned for
us to pick up the conver station later this year
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(30:36):
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On last week's episode, we discussed new opportunities in the
future of manufacturing in a more connected future. We heard
from Irene Patrick, Senior director of Industrial Innovation in the
Internet of Things Group at Intel, Pat McCusker, CEO of
fast Radius, a company which is using three D printing
on an industrial scale to reimagine the supply chain, and
(00:25):
Sean Peterson, founder of strong Arm Technologies, a company using
data to help improve workers safety. One of the world's
oldest and most established industries is still changing and innovating
day after day. You know ever more connective future. The
(00:46):
way we cultivate our crops and livestock is modernizing and
becoming more and more precise. The next generation of wireless
innovation with future five G networks will create new opportunities
for more efficient farming and irrigation techniques with new ways
to gather and process data straight from the field. Thanks
to support from Teamobile, for Business Today will explore how
(01:07):
advancements in five G connectivity will enable innovations in the
agriculture industry that could shape the future of farming. Unlocking
the ability of farmers to make real time decisions is
(01:30):
really what makes the difference it's great that you could
see what you should have done a week later, but
it's really truly magical when you can make that decision
while there's an opportunity to still change whatever you need
to change to improve your practices or your decisions. That's
Julian Sanchez. He's Director of Precision Agriculture for the Intelligent
(01:52):
Solutions Group at John Deer, which is one of the
largest manufacturers of agricultural equipment in the world. Essentially, julian
job is to leverage new technology, including five G and
AI to make farming faster and more efficient. But what
exactly is precision agriculture. If you had a farmer that
decided I'm going to just grow one plant, and I'm
(02:16):
going to dedicate all of my resources at maximizing the
yield the output of that one plant, and guarantee you
that plant would do quite well. So just imagine this
farmer putting that plant in the best possible conditions, giving
it just the right nutrients and the right fertilizers, and
putting the seed in the ground exactly on the day
(02:36):
when it would maximize the amount of sun that plant
would get throughout the growing season. The objective of precision
agriculture is to try to enable farmers to farm hundreds
or thousands or tens of thousands of acres with that
same mentality. Precision agriculture is providing farmers with the technology
(02:57):
and the tools to allow them to do microman men
at scale where they're able to make the best possible
decisions that maximize the output of each individual plant. In
other words, the goal of precision of farming is to
allow farmers to give crops individual attention at scale, and
this can help better manage resources like water and minimize
(03:17):
the use of pesticides and fertilizers, and of course create
more value. You have a business that sometimes has pressures
of external pressures, whether it be whether whether it be
availability of labor, whether it be trade, and so a
farmer is always looking to make improvements to maximize their
margins and improve their productivity. When we look at technologies
(03:42):
like five G coming down the pipeline, the increased bandwidth
and the lower latencies have tremendous opportunities to unlock value
and the types of solutions that could be then rolled
out into market and put in the hands of farmers.
The value that Julian mentions is all about better understanding
how to optimize the food we grow. Modern day farming
(04:03):
already involves the use of computers, algorithms, and technology just
as much as it does tractors and soil. But as
wireless networks become faster and the infrastructure reaches further as
with the promise of future five gen networks, we can
expect the agricultural industry to become even more precise and efficient.
In this episode, we'll dive into the world of precision farming,
(04:25):
take a look at how censors and robotics can be
used in the field, and discussed how greater connectivity could
transform one of the world's oldest industries. I'm as Lachen
this is This Time Tomorrow. So cart before this series,
when I thought about farming, technology wasn't the first place
(04:45):
my mind would go, Oh really, because I think tractors
are the original Tesla's actually all right, And in the
very first episode of This Time Tomorrow, we spoke to
Durga Malady of Qualcom and he said that agriculture is
an area that he's most excited out five G transforming. Yeah,
I mean, if you think about it, there's just so
much data to collect from farms. You know, first of all,
(05:07):
they often span huge geographical areas, and there are all
kinds of equipment needed to tend to crops. You tractors,
combine harvesters, irrigation systems. I know a lot about this,
and the promise of future five G networks is all
about gathering data from more sources, combining it, analyzing it,
and making recommendations in real time. We've looked at everything
(05:28):
from fashion to auto to manufacturing, and there's absolutely no
reason that agriculture should be any different. Right. We've covered
all those topics on this time tomorrow and this is
sadly our last episode of this season. One of the
big challenges in five G, though, is access. Farmlands are
often very large and sparsely populated, which has made it
challenging to network them. Some people believe five SHE could
(05:51):
actually play a role though, in solving that. Late last year,
the SEC announced a nine billion dollar fund for five
D development in rural areas that Ammon said, we must
ensure that FIG narrows rather than widens, the digital divide,
and that rural Americans received the benefits that come from
what is innovation, and actually billion dollars of that fund
(06:11):
has been a marks specifically for precision agriculture. I'm a
New Yorker, so I've never actually seen a real farm before,
but no, in all seriousness, precision farming was a new
concept for me, but it actually reminds me of many
other topics we've discussed on this show. Data and higher
bandwidth could allow for unprecedented specificity in manufacturing in the
(06:34):
automobile industry, and in this episode, I spoke with a
guy named Kirk Stevie who is a farmer in western
Minnesota and also an engineer by he is and Kirk
is working with Series Imaging, a company that uses aerial
photos and videos to provide farmers with information like whether
or not a plant has been watered enough and if
it's at risk for developing a disease. You mentioned tractors
(06:57):
and Tesla's since tractors, the advancements and every cultural machinery
are pretty amazing. And for this episode, I spoke with
George Cantor, who is a robotics professor at Connigie Mellon
and he and his team are building robots that work
autonomously or semi autonomously on farms. Before we get to George, though,
I want to go back to Julian Sanchez of John Deer.
(07:19):
There's something really really exciting about agriculture. You know, ultimately
it's a space that at a at a macro level,
it matters, right, So all the crabs being grown out
there ultimately resolved in the food we eat. In some
cases they result in many of the products that are
key to our society. Ensuring that we have a productive
and healthy food supply is essential, but so is protecting
(07:42):
our environment. Many believe that incorporating technology can help the
agricultural industry reduce its environmental footprint by being more efficient,
and that's where collecting and analyzing data can play such
an important role. One of the things that John Deere
has done in terms of rolling out tools and technologies
that help farmers adopt and embrace this idea of precision
(08:05):
agriculture is everything from putting the right sensors in the
machines so that the machines can sense where each seat
is being placed, how much fertilizer, how many nutrients are
being applied to each plant, and then at the end
of the season also sends what the yield of your
crops were, and so putting all of those sensors in
(08:28):
the machines, but then giving the farmers the ability to
transmit all of that data to a platform where they
can easily view it, they can easily analyze it, they
can share that data with their trusted advisors, and then
make better decisions for the next growing season. We are
in the age of big data, and agriculture is no exception.
(08:48):
But in order to transmit that data, farmers need connectivity,
which in rural areas is often lacking or incomplete. So
today farmers will in some cases be on the phone
with operators that are in the vehicles and saying, hey,
what are you seeing right now? Is the vehicle performing
the way it's supposed to? Are we seeing what we
expected out of the crops? And essentially in real time
(09:11):
sending instructions to operators about what to do. Today, farmers
share important data on the phone. Tomorrow, the promise of
future five gene networks is to collect and share that
data in real time, automatically and even directly to machines.
If we thought about a world in which you had
in rural America full coverage with no death spots that unlocked,
(09:35):
you know less than one second real time connectivity that
would have a tremendous impact on farmers. Farming is a
real time business where having the most recent data and
when I say recent, yes within the last five seconds
of what is happening in a vehicle and what kind
of performance you're getting out of the vehicle and doing
(09:56):
the job. Having that information at your fingertips in real
time allows you to make the necessary adjustments that really
ultimately impact your bottom line. And with AI, some of
these key decisions that need to take place in real
time can be made without human input. One of my
my favorite examples is a harvesting combine. Is the vehicle
(10:20):
you used to go through the field at the end
of the season and harvest the crops. This is essentially
a factory on wheels where conditions are changing literally by
the second. It's a tremendously difficult job. And our harvesting
combines are equipped with an artificial intelligence system that continuously
(10:40):
takes images of the crop that is going through the
machine as the machine tries to separate essentially the grain
from the rest of the plant and you know, just
hold onto the grain. It's using a convolutional neural network
to make decisions as to whether the grain samples are
the right quality, and it's automatically making a just ments
to this factory on wheels so that it can maintain
(11:03):
its optimal performance. We've seen already on this time tomorrow
how AI and five G can come together to deliver
on the promise of the Internet of things, connected devices
talking to one another as they monitor their environment to
optimize decisions. This could be particularly useful for farmers because
they're constantly dealing with highly variable processes and environments. Farming
(11:27):
is a domain where every inch of every field across
the world is different from the inch of field that's
right next to it. It might be the soil that's different,
it might be the topography, the micro topography of that field,
where the inch next to the other one gets a
(11:47):
little bit less water, and so all of a sudden,
when you start looking at the opportunity and agriculture to
try to get your arms around all of that variability
and help farmers maximize how they do their job. What's
exciting and the reason I wake up every morning is
that I feel like, despite the tremendous progress that has
(12:07):
been made in the industry, we are really really just
at the beginning of the journey and unlocking all of
that value. And I was curious about how Julian is
planning to leverage five G to help execute his vision
of the future of filming. Five G is an infrastructure
if it can help reduce or hopefully eliminate some of
(12:28):
the prevalent dark spots and connectivity. All of a sudden,
you can really imagine having solutions that are truly trying
to execute sort of coordinated logistics activities, coordinated semi autonomous
and fully autonomous operations in the fields by leveraging low latency,
high bandwidth five G solutions. While that's possible right now,
(12:52):
they exist in a in a very localized manner because
you cannot be relying on full coverage and connectivity to
be able to transmit data through a cloud. Garrot does
a factory on wheels that can readjust itself based on
images that it's taking in real time. Impress you. Steven
(13:13):
Spielberg made a movie, one of his first movies, I think,
was about a truck that went wrong, A bad a
bad truck. Hopefully the trucks will go right exactly. I
mean that I hope it's not that situation, but that's
sort of what this reminds me of. But I also know,
you know, much like having a warehouse in the cloud,
that these sort of things are the future in their
(13:35):
given industries. Absolutely, and the future is closer than we think.
I mean, people often ask how close are we to
the robotics revolution. Many ways, it's already arrived. Robots are
machines that make decisions for themselves, and that's exactly what
Julian was describing with that combine harvest. Yeah, and we
know from some of our previous episodes that future five
G networks could really support the expansion of robotics because
(13:58):
these moving robots will be able to connect to a
network that allows for really fast processing. Right. And despite
all the machinery built by John Deer and others, farming
remains one of the most labor intensive industries in the world.
There's so many tasks like picking fruit, to name just one,
that rely on people. And according to a California Farm
Bureau survey, I've also done my homework more than farmers
(14:21):
in the past five years have been unable to obtain
all the workers they need for the production of their
main crop. At the same time, growing populations and changing
climate is putting new pressure on food production, and these
are issues that George Cantor spends a lot of time
thinking about. First of all, everybody eats, so this touches
(14:43):
everyone on the planet. When you look at the way
food is produced now, we have several very serious challenges.
The rate at which we are increasing yields is not
high enough to meet the rate at which we are
increasing people. Climate change is changing the way agriculture real
production is done. It's making some regions more productive, it's
making other regions less productive. We're starting to grasp the
(15:06):
implications of our sort of highly chemical driven agricultural system.
It's a very big, complicated problem, and I think technology
can be part of the solution of that problem. According
to George, much of the solution relies on giving farmers
better information that people who grow plants for a living,
the more they know about the status of those plants,
(15:28):
the better they can do at making decisions that help
grow the plants. So, for example, when do apply fertilizer,
when to apply pesticide in a way that maximizes your
crop growth but at the same time minimizes the environment
impact that that decision might have. George is a robotics
researcher at Carnegie Mellon. Alongside better information, he's interested in
(15:50):
giving farmers better tools to leverage it. He and his
team are building robots designed to do jobs traditionally handled
by people, and despite concerns about displacing a labor, George
believes this automation is necessary. Some of the industries United States,
like apples and grapes, rely heavily on manual labor. It's
a terrible job, it's tedious, the environmental conditions are really rough,
(16:14):
and they're just having a very difficult time finding people
to do this work. And so they're very interested in
automating some of the things that people do currently. They
are difficult to automate because they require really intricate manipulation
with the environment. You know, if you if you pick
an apple off a tree, you have to grab it
just so, and you have to pull it off just so.
(16:35):
Sometimes you have to reach around branches and push things
out of the way, and robotics isn'to that state yet,
but that's that's where we're going. We're moving into manipulation
and touching plants, tackling problems like pruning and harvesting and
weeding and things like that. That's been our holy grail
for a while. In order for robots to be able
to accurately and effectively manipulate their environment, they need to
(16:58):
be able to sense it, which is something George has
been working on for more than a decade. I'm interested
in sensing the plants and inferring what their health is
from whatever it is we can sense. We can never
sense directly the things we want to sense, the things
we really want to sense, or things like what's going
on inside the leave for how is the water status
(17:18):
in the stem? We can't sense those things directly. This
process of taking things like camera images or local environmental
readings or whatever it is we can measure and using
that to infer what's going on inside the plant is
I think really interesting. And we've been spending the last
fifteen years on the sensing side of things. Sensing and modeling.
You take measurements and then you build up a model
(17:38):
of what you're looking at and you reason about what's there.
We've gotten really good at it, and so now it's
time to build upon that and move into the actually
reaching out and making the cut side of things. And
that's why you know, we're moving into the manipulation in
the agriculture space for sure. In George's vision, sensing and
manipulation powered by data connectivity and pros saying come together
(18:01):
to enable the vision for precision farming at scale and
improve outcomes for farmers. Some people consider precision farming as
making decisions at the scale of blocks that are tens
of acres. Some people consider precision farming to be making
decisions at the scale of individual plants. But basically it
(18:21):
means tailoring your treatment to the specific environment and plant
status at wherever it is you're applying that treatment. The
old way, the non precision way to farm, is just
to plant the same thing everywhere in the field and
treat it the same way throughout the course of the
growing season. But if you were to instead, you know,
(18:41):
take what you know about that field and break it
up into smaller areas where you have different microclimates and
maybe there's a different slope or the the sun is
coming in from a different direction, and then adapt what
you plant and how you treat it after you plant
it based on those factors that that becomes precision farming.
(19:01):
Five G capabilities are still improving, but the abasity to
connect to low latency, high bandwidth mobile internet could transform agriculture.
The flip side is that right now, a lot of
the environments we work in they don't even have any
cellular at all. Forget about four G or even three
G or even one X like they have nothing, and
(19:24):
so if they're not going to cover those areas, then
it's not going to have the impact that it could
have Without the connectivity. The things you can do, how
far you can go with precision agriculture is limited, and
the more you know about what's going on in the plants,
the better you can grow stuff. The biggest barrier right
now to getting that information is not sensing it. We've
(19:44):
got great sensor technologies, it's transmitting it to wherever it
needs to be. And so that's one thing that I
think five G has the potential to have a big
impact on the future. With five G is coming today,
T Mobile is leading the five G charge with thirty
(20:04):
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Improved connectivity, and true mobility provided by an advanced network
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the best technologies available today in the wireless space so
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(20:26):
T Mobile for Business knows that the future of business
will be powered by advancements in wireless networks. With these
new technologies opening the doors for better ways to get
the job done. Business is changing. Learn more at t
Mobile for Business dot com. To Garrett, George underlined the
importance of delivering five G to rural areas, which in
(20:49):
some cases don't even have three G today. Policymakers and
telcos are aware of that challenge and taking steps to
address it. The other Teain George mentioned that policymakers are
thinking of about what should be thinking about is how
new technologies can change the labor market, in some cases
making sudden kinds of jobs obsolete, although the George points
(21:09):
out many agricultural jobs are desirable and difficult to fill. Yeah,
we can't think of technology and a vacuum, though, we
need to think about the political and social consequences early
on in the process of building this technology out. But
on the other side of that, I think precision farming
could change the lifestyle for farmers for the better by
giving them the ability to keep eyes on their farm
(21:32):
without having to literally walk in the field, you know.
I spoke about this with Kirk Stevie, who is a
farmer and researcher who recently took over his family farm.
I like to say, I'm I'm part farmer and I'm
part geek. My farm with my family in western Minnesota,
(21:53):
where you run corn and soybeans and um. Also I
work as a research scientist and precision anymous the geek
part of Kirk works with the company based out of
California called Series Imaging that provides tools for precision farming,
but he also spends a lot of time on his
family farm. I live four hours from the farm, and
(22:13):
so I usually go stay out there with my uncle
Mark and aunt Becky that I farm with, and stay
for two three weeks. And so when I'm out there,
we're going hard. We're waking up before dawn and grabbing
a bite to eat, and then we're going and jumping
in the tractors to to plant or to harvest and
putting in sixteen seventeen eighteen hour days. We're planting beans,
(22:36):
were planting corn, dealing with fertilizer and machinery and so forth.
I was curious what has changed most since Kirk's grandfather
ran the family farm. What's really changed is every piece
of equipment it has a computer in it. And so
for most modern farms, they have a computer that says
powerful or more powerful than you know your regular desktop
(22:58):
or laptop computer sitting right in the h and so
you've got to know a lot about computers, GPS, and
you know, tying some of that technology to your traditional
machinery and what your classical farmers know and do well
to succeed in agriculture. The traditional skills of farming that
have been honed over thousands of years are not going anywhere.
But what is changing is the ability to leverage new
(23:20):
technologies like AI and five G to augment those skills.
In that sense, Kirk, the self described part geek, part farmer,
might be what the future looks like. As well as
working on his family farm, Kirk is a remote sensing
scientist with Series Imaging, a company that specializes in providing
high quality aerial images of farms to inform decision making.
(23:43):
I was integrating satellite data and imagery into the farming
operation already, but looking for alternatives, and that led me
to series where I was finding that they really had
a science driven product with next gen technology that I
wanted to integrate on the farm eries. Cameras can see
that water stress where an irrigation device is not functioning
(24:04):
properly fourteen days before you can see it with your
eyes at least, and so that allows the growers a
chance to correct it and respond. They can get a
sense that they're putting too much water on, not enough,
or if there are issues, and so really it ties
into conserving water, which is obviously outstanding, but obviously it
saves the grower money as well. Our cameras are custom built,
(24:27):
so they're sensitive to different parts of the spectrum um
thermal imaging being one. When plants aren't having enough water
put on them and they start a defense mechanism where
there's stamata close up and that heats up the canopy
and we can pick that up with our thermal cameras.
Stomata are tiny openings in the plant that allow for
the intake of carbon dioxide and release of other vapors
(24:50):
like water and oxygen. The human eye would be unable
to see if these stomata were open or closed, but
thermal imaging from above can trace their heat pattern and
then indicate to a farmer that they need to water
a specific patch of crops before it's too late. This
is precision farming in action. Certainly growers, they're very accustomed
(25:11):
to seeing that variability in the field. The tricky part
is how do we quantify that very precisely and deliver
it in a format to attractor so it can act
and do something with it. Uh that's where we can
show value. And so we have a network of pilots
that have apps in the fields built right in, and
so they'll have a flight plan that we've custom designed,
(25:33):
and those pilots go up and execute and fly the
fields based off the flight plan in this app, collect
all the data and loaded up to the cloud where
it's kicked to our processing team on the backside out
in California, and then within twenty four hours, the grower,
the agronomous what have you. They can view this imagery
(25:54):
on their smartphones while they're walking the fields, and so
it's very close to having instant access to a broad
scale field data. Twenty four to forty eight hours may
not seem like a long time, but to a crop
needing water, it can make a huge difference. So one
of the things that makes Kirk most excited about the
future is the ability to collect, process, and serve that
(26:14):
data to farmers in real time. This is something Kirk
hopes five G will make possible. Right now. You know,
we deliver our imagery just for even a visual observation
if a grower wants to look at it right now.
With the existing network, even at that level, there are obstacles.
You can't even see your data on a phone on
(26:34):
many fields, and so if five G was ubiquitous, I
mean that would mean instant access after the data is
collected from your field, you know, you wouldn't have any issues.
Not only could you look at it and make a
qualitative decision about scouting, you can also obviously sink it
up instantly with your equipment for action. And so when
we have that more seamless and efficient loop, that's going
(26:57):
to make it even better. Available now from my Heart,
a new series presented by Tembile for business, The Restless
Ones join host Johnathon Strickland as he explores the upcoming
five year revolution and the business leaders who stand right
on the cutting edge. There are certain decision makers who
(27:19):
are restless they know there is a better way to
get things done, and they're ready, curious and excited for
the next technological innovation to unlock their vision of the future.
These Restless Ones are in pursuit of bigger, better, smarter, stronger.
They seek new partners, new strategies, new processes. They pursue
(27:39):
innovative platforms and solutions to propel their teams, businesses, and
industries forward. In each episode, we'll learn more from the
Restless Ones themselves and dive deep into how they think
of five year revolution could propel their business forward. The
Restless Ones is now available on the I Heart Radio
app or wherever you listen to podcasts. So, Carol, we
(28:06):
live in a city, New York City, the Big Apple,
and unless we're on the subway or in an elevator,
we usually have some kind of access to a WISE network.
But for rural America where they grow the Apples, it
can be quite a different experience. Yeah, there are areas
that just don't have the infrastructure for mobile broadband, but
five G has such promising potential for agriculture, so it
(28:29):
will be crucial to make sure it is widely deployed
to allow for all the amazing future applications we have
discussed in this episode. Well, that wraps up this series
of This Time Tomorrow. It's been fun, it has and
it's a good way of thinking about the future. It is.
You brought up this concept of the adjacent possible in
the first episode, and we spent the last eight episodes
(28:52):
exploring what that might look like in all kinds of
different industries. We started off in Silicon Valley with some
researchers who were key to building the technology G that
underlies five G. We spoke with a NASA scientist, local
officials trying to improve their communities, researchers, roboticists, and of
course business leaders. And it's clear that although we don't
know exactly when and how five G will transform key industries,
(29:15):
the next generation of wireless has the potential to be
even more transformative than the jump from those old Nokia
phones to our beloved smartphones. Yeah, and as Paul Dillinger,
who you'll remember is the head of global Product Innovation
at Levi's, said in our episode on the future of retail,
we don't know what the future will look like, but
we know it will be different than today and it
(29:35):
will be really interesting. To see how wireless networks change
standards for businesses and consumers in the coming years. As
five G moves from the building phase to the here
and now, as this time tomorrow becomes today, We'll see
you there. This maybe the end of season one, but
(29:55):
we're not finished yet with this conversation. Stay tuned for
us to pick up the conver station later this year
with continued support from our friends at T Mobile for Business.
No matter what you're after, T Mobile for Business is
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here with a network born mobile and built from the
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(30:36):
expect from America's most loved wireless company. Business is changing.
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