Vertical: Agriculture
Application: Precision agriculture
Ecosystem: GXC, CNH Industrial
Private Network: 5G, CBRS
GXC has announced a new partnership with CNH Industrial and Ohio State University to accelerate research in smart agriculture technologies.
The collaboration brings together GXC’s expertise in private wireless networking, CNH Industrial’s leadership in agriculture equipment manufacturing, and Ohio State’s renowned agricultural research program.
At the heart of this initiative is the deployment of a private 5G network by GXC using the CBRS band on Ohio State’s Molly Caren Agricultural Center in London, Ohio. This dedicated wireless infrastructure will provide the connectivity backbone to enable advanced precision agriculture applications.
“We are delighted to join forces with CNH and OSU to provide a state-of-the-art private cellular network that will serve as the communication backbone for the institution’s agricultural research. Through this scalable and secure network, the University will have a network that will not only deliver the performance and coverage it needs today, but can easily scale to support future research initiatives,” said Allen Proithis, chief executive officer at GXC.
Some of the key use cases that will be explored include autonomous operation of CNH Industrial’s farming equipment, real-time collection of crop and field data from IoT sensors, and autonomous vehicles.
“One of the benefits of the private cellular network is its unique flexibility and scalability, which can be more cost-effective than other communications infrastructures. As our needs evolve, we can expand the network very quickly and inexpensively to pursue new research initiatives that will accelerate the adoption of digital agriculture technologies to improve agricultural productivity and sustainability at farm, regional, national, and global scales,” said Dr. Scott A. Shearer, chair of Food, Agricultural and Biological Engineering at Ohio State University.“
The private network provides the ultra-reliable, low-latency connectivity required for autonomous vehicle control and data-intensive video/sensor streaming. It also offers enhanced security compared to public cellular networks.
As one of the leading agriculture research institutions, Ohio State brings deep domain expertise to help test and validate the smart farming concepts enabled by the private wireless infrastructure.
The partnership plans to share learnings from the research testbed to drive wider adoption of smart agriculture technologies across the industry. The private 5G network deployment is already underway, setting the stage for cutting-edge trials in the coming years.
