What is the IoT and how is it a part of agriculture? We’ve entered an era where any device that can benefit from being internet connected can and should be connected to the internet and other devices. Why? Data.

The two biggest buzz words in technology today are IoT and Big Data. IoT is the ecosystem of interconnectedness which enables the collection and transmission of data to be analyzed and used to reduce costs, maintain compliance, enable new business models, improve efficiencies and collaborate.

This session will explore the art of the possible when you add the IoT ecosystem to the agriculture ecosystem.

Like many industries, precision agriculture is in the middle of a digital revolution.  Today’s large and local farms are adopting Internet of Things (IoT) solutions designed help farmers increase the quality, quantity, sustainability and cost effectiveness of agricultural production.  These solutions allow farmers to monitor sensors that can be used to detect soil moisture, crop growth and livestock feed levels, and remotely manage and control connected harvesters and irrigation equipment among other key functions.

In this presentation, Senet will discuss the types of networks available to support IoT applications, with a focus on various Low Power Wide Area technologies that are ideal for “smart agriculture”.  Low-power wide-area networks (LPWANs) are designed for sensors and applications that need to send small amounts of data over long distances a few times per hour from a variety of environments and run on battery power lasting years.  Having already gained traction in markets with similar challenges, LPWANs are now attracting interest across the agriculture industry.  

In this talk, Michael Finegan will focus on public and private network communication options for agricultural deployments. He will review cellular and long range RF solutions, including LoRaWAN, Sigfox, Ingenu, and NB IOT, and compare link budget, bandwidth, and power efficiency. In addition to the physical characteristics, he will discuss how various technologies are positioned in the marketplace and will talk about deployment types, utilizing aggregation methods that use gateways and concentrators, allowing companies to process data locally. Discover at what point the LPWA topology needs to transition from a campus area network to a macro network. Developers will learn about specific pre-certified system-on-modules and how to deploy them within a hybrid network. We will review the important role that microcontrollers play in developing sensor-based networks and how various controllers impact the overall power consumption. Understand how to use of scripts and applications to process data on the edge of the network, allowing devices to create actionable data, versus packet forwarding to the cloud.  Growers and AgTech enthusiast will learn some best practices about how to leverage crowdsourcing platforms to move from prototype to production quickly.

Internet of Things (IoT) application software provides a web visualization of IoT data.  Web applications give  IoT data its business context.  In this presentation, Kim Pearson will provide an overview of IoT web applications and current IoT software technology trends. IoT opportunities for growers, equipment OEMs, ag retailers and solution providers will be highlighted.

Our expert panel discusses the components of an IoT ecosystem.