The second trial of the PRIORITY project will focus on Smart Rural Business, which aims to increase the vitality and attractiveness of remote areas. Important enablers of smart rural business include digitalisation, advanced telecommunications and artificial intelligence. There is a lot of telecommunication in agriculture, and ensuring the usability of it is challenging, especially in sparsely populated areas. Especially in remote rural areas, for example, the large amount of data processed, integrated information systems and real-time video transmission need proper communication connections for immediate data transmission.
Operating in intelligent agriculture is hampered by the silage of data in the systems of different manufacturers and the lack of technologies and organizations that connect data sources. Although more than 70 per cent of households in densely populated areas were covered by the availability of high-speed fixed broadband connections, the proportion in sparsely populated rural areas was less than 30 per cent at the end of 2019.
The second trial of the PRIORITY project aims at better coverage of mobile networks, which will bring more data transmission capacity to agriculture and forestry. It also strongly emphasizes the importance of the functionality of telecommunications in farm operations and the needs of the farmer in different cases of farm use. In agriculture and forestry, complementary telecommunication network solutions may be needed to ensure that the opportunities offered by smart agriculture are exploited.
Modern technologies provide, among other things, more accurate data for the use of farms and forestry, which enables work to be done proactively. Large spaces can also be monitored centrally. In addition, certain agricultural and forestry work can be automated so that work is more accurate and faster.
The second trial of the PRIORITY project will test intelligent agricultural technologies, such as local base station network communication, remote tractor control (Valtra tractor), sensors inside a robotic barn, utilization of drone technology for data collection and extraction of foreign objects and identification of fertilizer application by artificial intelligence.
A tactical base station and information security to be set up at the site will create operational reliability for the ERP system that controls intelligent technologies. Field testing will take place in Saarijärvi during 2021. As with each of the three trials in the project, a video of the field tests in the second trial will be produced, showing the trial-related critical communication use scenarios and documenting the field testing.