FCC Members Guide Precision Agriculture Task Force at First Meeting
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai told the new Precision Agriculture Task Force that America's need for broadband on farms and ranches will only increase, at its first meeting Monday. Farmers and ranchers want to upload huge amounts of data to the cloud, "and that's why broadband is going to be central," he said. Pai said task force insights will be important in advising the FCC on how to spend at least $1 billion of the proposed $9 billion 5G Fund that he announced last week (see 1912040027). He said without such USF support for precision agriculture, there might be no business case for 5G in many rural areas.
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Commissioner Mike O'Rielly said the agency is interested in hearing how the technology might advance, as well as what precision agriculture applications are available. He asked whether some current precision agriculture applications could rely on internet services less robust than broadband if they poll a connected device multiple times a day. "Do you really need broadband now?" And if so, what are the uses, he asked.
Members should pay attention to cost efficiency in making recommendations, O'Rielly said. "Let's make dollars stretch as far as humanly possible," he said. "Those are our dollars, and we're really protective of them." O'Rielly noted government's goal to have broadband support precision agriculture with 95 percent penetration by 2025. "My goal is to get broadband to 95 percent of American homes" first, O'Rielly said. He said it's not that he's not interested in precision agriculture. "It's about balance," he said, and putting consumers first. O'Rielly said USF support for precision agriculture is probably not going to go to fiber, more likely for satellite or 5G.
Commissioner Brendan Carr told us the FCC policy supporting precision ag will require a mix of telecom technologies, including fiber, low earth orbit satellites and 5G mobile wireless. "The end goal is technology across rural America," Carr said. He added it's important the FCC take the right regulatory steps to support expanding such technologies across rural areas.
The Agriculture Department prioritizes fiber in rural broadband programs because it's likely to last longer than some other broadband technologies that might require additional investments more frequently, said Chad Rupe, Rural Utilities Service administrator. He advises providing 100 Gbps for both upload and download to support data-heavy precision farming services.
There's an economic case for delivering broadband to rural farmland even if there's not a lot of people, Carr told the group. Carr said on visits, he saw coffee cups full of USB drives of data collected on crops and cattle. "What is the use of collecting all this data" if it's going to go into a coffee cup and not somewhere it can be analyzed and put to use, he asked. He cited imaging technology that can spot problems with plants two days before the human eye can, and "that can make a huge difference." He noted precision agriculture technology can pull 432 terabytes of data out of a field of crops, many times the amount of data in the Library of Congress.
The group's next meeting is scheduled March 25. Four smaller working groups will meet by phone and report back to the larger task force.