Think of a cutting-edge, high-tech environment. You’re probably not thinking of a farm, are you? Yet, in the flourishing landscapes of New Zealand, a cherry farm is leading the charge in embracing smart farming and Industry 4.0 applications to improve productivity, costs, safety and working conditions, creating a high-tech environment in harmony with its rural surroundings.
New Zealand Cherry Corp, owner of one of the largest netted cherry orchards in New Zealand, has been involved in growing and exporting cherries globally since 2005. Within that, they have utilized cutting-edge solutions to revolutionize traditional farming practices, with high-speed fiber broadband as the enabler.
Broadband-enabled Farm 4.0
At the heart of New Zealand Cherry Corp’s approach lies comprehensive electronic tracking of almost everything that happens on the farm. It is facilitated by robust broadband infrastructure that ensures seamless data flows from orchard to pack house to the cloud and customers, providing an efficient way to increase productivity, and meet stringent food safety standards and regulatory compliance for international export markets.
Looking deeper into this Farm 4.0 journey: every year, the farm harvests around 55 million cherries. The cherries are transported to the pack house, where advanced optical sorting technology captures 78 high-definition infra-red images of every single cherry. These images are analyzed by the app located within the cloud, and based on the variety, color, size, stem, texture and other characteristics, the app provides feedback to the sorting machine, so it can sort the cherry into one of 30 output drops.
Why is this a game changer?
Automated sorting is both a revenue generator and a cost saver. Sorting is important because it allows upselling. Without it, all fruit would be mixed, so premium, regular and low-grade fruit end up in the same box, which is then sold at an average price. By sorting fruit into different categories, the farm can now sell premium fruit for a premium price, and fruit that would previously have ended up as waste can be routed towards other uses, for example, to make beverages, ice creams, etc. So, more revenue and less waste. Without an automated sorter, you would need around 1,000 people to do the job.
Now think about all the HD infra-red images that go from the pack house to the cloud. This is around 400,000 photos every hour, each having 20MB+ size. Sending this amount of data to the cloud requires a reliable, high-capacity and low-latency network. Fiber broadband PON is the only technology that can deliver that in an efficient way. Copper broadband, which was previously used by the farm, was lacking capacity and reliability, and 5G mobile was not cost-efficient.
One may ask why the farm uses cloud-based applications. Why not host the app on-premises and avoid the need for high-speed broadband? The reason is that the sorting season for the farm is only a few weeks long, and so they only need the application during that time. Having the app on-premises would require purchasing a server and application, in addition to hiring an IT expert to take care of all that. Instead, leasing the app in the cloud, when needed, is a cost-efficient, peace-of-mind alternative.
The huge capacity of fiber is also backhauling an orchard-wide Wi-Fi mesh network, enabling applications outside of the harvesting season. Pruning trees requires a massive crew over a significant period of months, with a huge amount of effort and time utilized to train someone on how to prune a tree. But now, every tree is tracked and scanned, and with augmented reality using a smartphone’s camera, an image will pop up on the phone with instructions such as: “Cut these branches off,” or “Prune all the areas highlighted in red.”
There is also an opportunity to track bees, which is important to capture their health condition and pollination activities to accurately forecast the harvesting period, so the farm can be prepared at the right time.
End-to-end traceability ensures compliance with food safety standards and regulatory requirements. For example, if one of the pickers falls ill they can easily trace every single cherry that the picker handled and recall them from the shelves. From knowing the exact tree where a cherry was grown to understanding the conditions under which it was harvested and processed, consumers can have confidence in the quality and integrity of the product they are buying.
Smarter, safer, more sustainable
New Zealand Cherry Corp is a beacon of innovation in the agricultural landscape, embracing technologies to improve efficiency, productivity, safety, and sustainability. With fiber broadband-enabled automation, New Zealand Cherry Corp expects to increase production from 55M to 150M cherries per year.
This is a great example of the transformative power of fiber broadband on modern agriculture. As PON technology increases capacity to 10 Gb/s, 25 Gb/s and beyond, broadband is increasingly being used to connect enterprises, Industry 4.0, smart cities and more, becoming a unified digital infrastructure that connects everything. Simultaneously, it is the greenest of all access technologies: the more we connect using fiber broadband, the better it is for our green planet.
Welcome to the Fiber for Everything era, where fiber broadband is paving the way to a smarter, more sustainable future.
