University of Guelph Graduate Student Emily Duncan attended the Farms.com Precision Agriculture Conference this winter.
The conference was over sold again for 2017 with more than 350 precision ag enthusiasts attending! Attendees had a day and half to learn ways to Solve the Precision Agriculture Puzzle, hearing from expert speakers from Canada, the United States and the Ukraine. The schedule was packed and covered the full range of the challenges and opportunities presented by innovations in precision agriculture.
Precision agriculture relies heavily on incredibly complex Internet of Things-like infrastructure and data management. Telematics technology captures data from farm equipment operating in a field and transfers the data to the Internet in real time— and in order for this to work, connectivity and speed of data transfer is crucial to modern farm operations (this great article from the Southwest Farm Press highlights the relationship between connectivity and precision agriculture).
This is why SWIFT is committed to extending access to ultra-high-speed connectivity to rural communities – and why we’re working with the R2B2 Project to understand the impact of this extension on the agricultural economies of our region.