With a $125,000 grant from BroadbandOhio, The Ohio State University's College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences worked with OARnet to enhance internet connectivity at its Molly Caren Agricultural Center in London, Ohio. Serving as a central hub for agricultural field research and home to the renowned Farm Science Review, this facility plays a critical role in developing and showcasing industry advancements in the use of artificial intelligence for autonomous farming.
The Farm Science Review, a yearly three-day farm show uniting farmers nationwide, serves as a platform for sharing insights on agricultural technologies and practices. To spotlight these technological advancements, it was important for the Molly Caren Agricultural Center to have reliable high-speed internet access on-site.
With the help of commercial broadband provider partners, OARnet has connected the center to its fiber-optic backbone. A private 4G LTE connection supports research on autonomous farming and other agricultural technologies, said Nicole Six, senior relationship manager at Ohio State’s Office of Technology and Digital Innovation.
The adoption of automation in the agriculture industry ranges from self-driving tractors to drones for crop health monitoring and artificial intelligence to guide spray application and is already revolutionizing all types of agriculture.
“The shift towards automation within the industry is happening very rapidly, which is why we needed to make sure the Molly Caren Agricultural Center was set up to be one of the premier places in the country where these technologies can be demonstrated,” said Scott Shearer, chair of the Department of Food, Agricultural and Biological Engineering at Ohio State. “It is our goal to lead the nation in thinking about the digitization of agriculture.”
While a high-speed internet connection may not be the first thing that comes to mind in relation to farming, technologies leveraging artificial intelligence require the transfer of massive amounts of data to and from devices, not only to operate but to be trained, improving their functionality.
“Before we can deploy fully autonomous machines, we are going to have what's called supervised autonomy, where an operator monitors one or more machines from a remote location. To be able to do this, we need enough bandwidth for multiple live video streams,” Shearer said. “Additionally, most of the training of these AI-driven machines will require millions of images. The question becomes how we move that data from the field to the cloud to create intelligence, and then how do we move the intelligence back to the machine in the field."
Although self-driving pedestrian vehicles are in development, the agricultural industry can’t directly translate that technology into the field, due to the range of conditions farmers face. To facilitate autonomous agriculture, researchers must collect a substantial amount of data from real farms.
“When you look at agricultural settings, they're all over the map, so when you think about deploying artificial intelligence for an automated car versus an automated tractor, they are two totally different scenarios,” Shearer said. “The crop mix is never the same and crops are actively growing all the time.”
As agriculture embraces digital advancements, the industry will see a growing demand for workers with expertise in computer science and related fields. With the new internet connection, Ohio State can allow students off-site to actively participate in agricultural research at the center, Shearer said.
Supporting workforce development and research advancements in the state are major goals for OARnet, which is part of the Ohio Department of Higher Education’s Ohio Technology Consortium.
"Efforts to establish enhanced connectivity at the Molly Caren Agricultural Center align with OARnet's greater mission to support research and provide Ohio with the evolving tools to excel in education and industry on a national scale,” said Pankaj Shah, executive director of OARnet.
Written by Kiah Easton.
