Happy Monday! Last month I condensed my 60-min "blockchain in the food chain" talk into a ten-minute introduction at the Animal Ag Alliance Summit in Kansas City. You can check out the slides or watch the recording for the full experience.

If you read last week's edition, I talked about Beth Ford's ambitions to help rural America by improving the internet infrastructure. This is not an easy problem to solve. Fiber is expensive. Wireless is touchy. And 5G won't solve this issue. Wait, you thought 5G was going to solve everything? Don't worry, it's not your fault - the hype machine is running at full steam. 5G won't help rural communities because increased bandwidth comes with less coverage, meaning your need more cells than 3G or 4G to reach the same amount of capacity. 5G will be revolutionary for smart cities and self-driving cars but not rural America and certainly not agtech.

The two emerging technologies that can help rural America are low-orbit internet satellites and edge computing. Now, I'm not talking about the crappy satellite internet connections we have had for the last decade. Those satellites are 22,200 miles up in the air, and as you can imagine, can be laggy. I'm talking Starlink from SpaceX and the handful of other companies deploying low-orbit internet connected satellites 210 miles above the surface. SpaceX just launched 60 last week.

That's cool - what is edge computing then? Well, you know that iPhone you have in your pocket? It now packs a machine learning chip, the A12 neural engine, and more than 6 billion transistors. That means it can do things like facial recognition (FaceID) without needing to send the data back and forth to the cloud. As the IoT network that will support the future of food is rolled out, it will likely rely on edge computing and low-orbit satellites.

Sounds great and all but as I eluded to last week - security of these networks will be paramount. Whether its activists, bioterrorists or international espionage - if the entire food production system is connected to the internet, security will have to rely on more than just obscurity.