# Digital Agriculture Infrastructure in the USA and Germany +
## 3 Digital Agriculture Infrastructure  
### Usa  
The deployment and adoption of digital technology by agriproducers is expected to enhance food production in the USA as in other parts of the world to meet the increasing population of the world with more than 9.5 billion people by 2050. Digital devices and sensors, such as satellite remote sensing, UAV imaging systems, Internet of Things (IoT) sensing systems, and ground-based robotic systems, are rapidly becoming more common in agriculture for collecting high-resolution temporal and spatial big data of crops, animals, environment, and farm equipment. With the advance of big data analytic technologies and artificial intelligence, digital data are able to be used to monitor production, improve efficiency, and increase agricultural sustainability. In addition, these advanced systems allow farms to be more profitable, efficient, safe, and environmentally friendly, conserving our natural resources.  
To successfully adopt and implement these advancements, wireless connectivity is an enabling technology. However, the wireless network infrastructure for data transfer in agriculture is still lacking. We feel that there are three layers of networks that need consideration in the US: (i) backbone connectivity (\"to the internet\"), (ii) regional network infrastructure (wireless transfer of data from the farm to the nearest backbone, e.g., TV whitespace, private 4G LTE, or cellular hotspot), and (iii) local sensor networks (e.g., low-power, wide-area networks or LPWANs) for collection of sensor/machine data.  
Companies, such as Farmobile, The Climate Corporation, Trimble, Farmers Edge, Ag Leader, and John Deere, are establishing proprietary networks, some with the assistance of companies, such as Trilogy, a company that advocates the use of a private 4G LTE network on the farm. Why 4G? Data would be more secure and faster, since a private 4G LTE network does not use the more traditional cell phone network. Data is collected directly via the CAN bus on the tractor, combine, or sprayer. Data transfer to the cloud varies as The Climate Corporation (Bayer) first transfers that data from the CAN bus via Bluetooth to the iPad. The iPad later connects to the Internet via Wi-Fi, and the data is transferred to The Climate Corporation cloud. Farmobile uses traditional cell phone networks (when available) to immediately transfer the data to the Farmobile cloud.  
Data analysis is more efficient via artificial intelligence systems after being placed on cloud-based servers. Companies have also adopted data transfer systems similar to those used by Netflix and Hulu (for TV viewing). Why are multiple and different data transfer systems used and not a single common system? Because 80% of the 24 million American households do not have reliable, affordable, high-speed broadband in the rural areas (Federal Communications Commission's report). Digital technology and understanding this data will change the way the American farmer works; however, the USDA [1] recently noted that digital row crop technology is being adopted, yet the livestock and special crop production remains at the early innovator stages. According to the same article, \"90 percent of the people do nothing with the data that they collect. They don't know what to do with it.\" It seems we have two challenges: (i) the USA needs an agricultural workforce that understands the best use of digital technologies, and (ii) as stated earlier, there is a lack of Internet access in rural communities. According to the Leichtman Research Group [2], broadband is penetrating the USA home in many cities. However, this is not the case for rural areas in US.