📡 FCC to Auction Broadest Set of Airwaves Yet to Spur 5G Service (Bloomberg)

🤖 New autonomous farm wants to produce food without human workers (Technology Review)

The farm’s non-lettuce-consuming staff consists of a series of robotic arms and movers. The arms individually pluck the plants from their hydroponic trays and transfer them to new trays as they increase in size, maximizing their health and output—a luxury most outdoor farms don’t have. Big white mechanical movers carry the 800-pound water-filled trays around the facility.

🥬 Ikea now grows lettuce in shipping containers at its stores (Fast Company)

Inside each shipping container, a hydroponic growing system holds four levels of plants, or up to 3,600 heads of lettuce. There’s no soil, no pesticides or herbicides, and, like other indoor farming, the system uses up to 90% less water than growing crops in a field. LED lights, running on renewable energy like the rest of the Ikea store, are tuned to help the plants grow as quickly as possible. The lettuce also gets nutrients from food waste.

🤳 A tech revolution in agriculture is leaving some farmers without broadband behind (McClatchy)

The Department of Agriculture estimates that 29 percent of U.S farms have no access to the internet. Those unconnected farms are getting left behind as some farms with broadband adopt new technology that allows them to sharply reduce use of herbicide and insecticide, fertilize fields more precisely and amass data from the liberal use of sensors.

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