- It’s private 5G time on Swan Trails Farm
- Swan Trails Farm's network uses Moso 5G radios and a Druid 5G SA core
- SNS Telecom & IT said that private networks in the agriculture sector will account for $700 million between 2025 and 2028
As the seasons change and apples and pumpkins are ready to pick in Washington state, Swan Trails Farm is offering multitudes of fruit and vegetables, a corn maze and this year a private 5G network to help its farm laborers.
Scott Waller, CTO of systems integrator Khasm Labs worked with Moso Networks and Druid Software to deploy the 5G private network. Waller told Fierce on a call that the network is based around a Druid 5G standalone (5G SA) core and uses 2 Moso 5G radios sitting on top of a barn “to cover about 80 acres” on the farm. The farm uses the 5G CBRS 3.5 GHz band to operate, with Starlink satellite backhaul.
“I’m upgrading their Starlink to a new dish because the old one is getting a little old,” Waller said.
He told Fierce that the Moso/Druid 5G network was first installed about a year ago. Now the farm is adding more fixed wireless access (FWA) and MiFi devices from Inseego and others.
Waller notes that the with harvest festival starting, “agro-tourists” visiting the farm can now buy their deep-fried apple donuts without delay by tapping on the Square payment tabs that are connected to the farm’s devices and supported by the private 5G network. The network also helps Swan Trail Farms measure rainfall and support crop growth.
It wasn’t always this easy, Waller noted, the farm was built around five years ago and the county put up around a million dollars for the facility to build a private 4G LTE network for the farm. It used equipment from Nokia, Amdocs, Cisco and Microsoft but wasn’t widely used in the day-to-day operations of the farm. The county wanted the farm to promote agri-tourism but “CBRS five years ago wasn’t as mature,” Waller noted.
Replacing all this equipment has tidied up the farm’s operations, Waller said. “We don’t have fans anymore — and all that dust and dirt and mouse poop,” he noted, saying that the 5G deployment cut down on all the fans that were used in its original 4G network deployment.
The farmer’s private network almanac
SNS Telecom & IT’s 5G research director Asad Khan told Fierce in an email that the firm considers Swan Trails Farm one of Khasam Lab’s flagship deployments.
“We track over 200 projects at farms and other agricultural settings in our database of private cellular network engagements, based on equipment supplied by a diverse range of vendors,” he added.
This range includes Nokia, Ericsson and Huawei to Celona, Moso Networks, Baicells, GXC, Trópico, Druid Software, Pente Networks, QCT (Quanta Cloud Technology), Firecell, Obvios, JET Connectivity, and BLiNQ Networks. Fujitsu and NEC just work on farm business in Japan. The analyst noted that this is not an exhaustive list for this sector.
“Generally, we view agriculture as one of the smaller verticals but with significant potential for growth, and more of an opportunity for non-incumbent vendors to compete with larger players on an equal footing,” Khan said. “Globally, we project private 5G and LTE network investments in the agriculture sector to cumulatively account for more than $700 million between 2025 and 2028,” he concluded.