Study on remote farming guidance in urban agriculture utilizing 5G for local area network and IoT devices

Sustainable urban agriculture development necessitates an increase in the number of new farmers, requiring a support system of agricultural extension officers.
Farmlands such as greenhouses are scattered throughout the city.
This results in long travel times for farmers seeking on-site guidance, limiting the officer in charge’s number of visits and guidance time.
If the guidance can be provided remotely rather than directly to farmers, one officer can quickly support more new farmers by providing precise guidance based on the plant growth stage.
In this study, the remote farming support technology utilizing 5G for local area networks with high capacity and speed data communications was researched.
We specifically asked a grower to wear smart glasses in a greenhouse equipped with both a surveillance 4K camera and a 5G system.
Tomato cultivation advice was provided by researchers from a laboratory 20 km away from the greenhouse.
The cultivation was staffed with growers who had no prior farming experience.
As a result, high-definition videos of plant organs were obtained by utilizing the zoom function of cameras, and the growth conditions could be accurately understood.
The smart glasses enabled the researchers to provide appropriate guidance to the grower by monitoring the condition of camera’s blind spots (medium, etc.) and the operations (leaf picking, etc.) in real time communication.
As direct visits to the greenhouse were limited to critical situations such as seedling inspection (five visits per year), remote guidance resulted in efficient guidance.
The tomato cultivation based on the guidelines yielded 31 t 10 a^‑1 of fruit, with fruit quality averaging around 5 Brix%. These findings indicate that the remote guidance was timely and accurate, suggesting that the guidance was a useful system for assisting farmers.

IV Asian Horticultural Congress – AHC2023

T. Kobayashi, K. Suzuki, A. Osada, T. Akiyama, H. Kawashima, M. Nakanishi

agricultural extension, 4K cameras, remote sensing, smart glasses, tomato cultivation

https://doi.org/10.17660/ActaHortic.2024.1404.38