S1E6: SC Ag Tech & Business Forum 2024 - TEch & Connectivity
In an era defined by rapid technological evolution, the intersection of agriculture and innovation takes center stage in South Carolina's farming landscape. Our Technology and Connectivity panel assembles visionaries from software development, broadband infrastructure, precision farming, and agricultural services to explore the transformative potential of cutting-edge technologies. From broadband development initiatives and the implications of artificial intelligence to the burgeoning applications of drones and artificial intelligence, our panelists will discuss the frontier of agricultural innovation. We will delve into the nexus of connectivity, innovation, and sustainable farming practices, forging pathways toward a digitally empowered and resilient agricultural future.
Date of Event: March 20, 2024
Location: Phillips Market Center, West Columbia, SC
Production Credits:
Introduction: Hannah Mikell
Producer: Kevin Royal
Editor: Kayla Peters
Technical: Trey McAlhany
Music Composer: R.M Davis
Special Thanks:
Transcript:
Agriculture is changing faster than ever with new technology transforming the way we farm and stay connected. Hi, I'm Hannah Michael, the host of Clemson Extension's Cultivate Ag podcast. I'm excited to introduce to you our technology and connectivity panel.
We brought together three experts from software development, broadband infrastructure, and precision agriculture to show you how these innovations are shaping the future of farming in South Carolina. From expanding rural broadband to the latest in AI and drone technology, we'll explore practical solutions that make farms more efficient, sustainable, and profitable. Join us for a down-to-earth discussion on the tools and technologies driving agriculture forward today.
All right, I'm not going to say anything else. This is the technology and connectivity panel. There's a little paragraph in the program.
I think it pretty well sets the tone, but these guys are also going to set the tone. I'm going to go through intros with you guys out of order with the way you're seating, but that's okay. We'll begin with Doug Hamilton.
Doug Hamilton has roles with MUSC and is also, more importantly probably for this panel, co-founder of Charleston Hacks. Doug, if you'd like to introduce yourself. Yes, my name is Douglas Hamilton.
Thanks so much, Kendall and Mallory, for inviting me here. At first, I wasn't sure why, but hopefully I'm going to be useful in some way. I'm part of a couple of different programs, one being the MUSC Human-Centered Design Program, where we're doing accelerators for medtech companies.
You can see it totally makes sense why I'm here. The other part, which I think is relevant, is we have a nonprofit called Charleston Hacks, which uses a really interesting format to solve problems. That format are called hackathon events.
That's relevant to all forms of tech, including agtech. Hopefully, it can be integrated into programming and figuring out how to actually deal with onboarding technologies. We like to solve problems in a really short period of time, most direct routes.
That's basically what I do. Doug doesn't speak highly enough of himself. He's an entrepreneur and an innovator, and that's what you're doing here.
I think what you're doing can help pull some of these ideas together and identify solutions towards moving forward with some of it. Next to Doug's left is Jim Stritzinger. Jim's with the South Carolina Broadband Office, which is in the Office of Regulatory Staff.
Did I get that right? Jim, if you'd like to say a few words. Sure.
Good afternoon, everybody. I want to say a special thanks to Ronnie and Kendall for the invite. I met Ronnie a couple years ago.
I don't even remember where. The next thing I know, my phone rings. He says, I got this event for you.
It's a real honor to be here. I'm the director of the South Carolina Broadband Office, again, within the Office of Regulatory Staff. The job of the broadband office is to make investments in getting everybody Internet.
Quite literally, my job is to get every resident and business in the state of South Carolina Internet service. We do that by making investments in Internet providers. My agency, my office does not build a single mile of fiber.
We don't hook up a single home. We make grant investments, and we make projects come to life otherwise they're not economically viable. The calculus of a business case just doesn't make sense unless you have an injection of government money to do it.
So we have a small team. I want to give you kind of a sense of how crazy it's been. I am not quite at my three-year anniversary with ORS.
I started in March of 2021. Lori knows this well. The broadband office did not exist at that time.
It was created by the General Assembly, and I can tell you we're incredibly grateful for the congressional support we've had. All the General Assembly and Governor McMaster could not have come together in a better way. And, of course, COVID was a great alignment force for broadband.
So the little old broadband office was formed in July of 2021. I inherited a grand total budget of $30 million at the time, which I thought was crazy, and a big responsibility. I was a one-man band, you know, so you hear this startup theme.
Less than two years later, I got an invitation to go to the White House last summer, and on top of the General Assembly allocating $400 million, the White House added $551 million more. This little old startup inside a state agency is now responsible for a billion dollars. With that amount of money comes incredible expectations, incredible challenges.
We're now counting dots in the state, quite literally. We've migrated from doing census blocks, some of you are familiar with that, to actually street address locations. So when we fund grants now, it's really a set of street addresses.
I will give you some statistics. I guess when I started, we had something akin to 300,000 locations in the state that needed help. I'm very incredibly proud to say with all the teamwork of the Internet Service Providers, and honestly I owe a lot of the success to them, we counted ahead of this grant round, we have a total of 60,000 locations in the whole state.
That's roughly 50,000 residential locations, about 10,000 business locations. And we still have $40 million more of American Rescue Plan money that will be invested by June. So we are very close to solving the digital divide permanently in South Carolina.
So the South Carolina that you think of, where rural residents didn't have connectivity, guess what? It's changing. If you haven't seen Internet construction in your area, I would be shocked.
You've probably seen these orange pipes sticking out of the ground, you may not have known what it was, the conduit coming out. It's everywhere. And I want to tell you, we probably have one of the best broadband offices, if not the best, in the U.
S. right now. I have an incredible team, I want to give them a shout out in our agency.
To absorb the amount of work we've had in such a short period of time is extraordinary, and I'm very, very grateful. So, just to give our northern neighbor, North Carolina, has easily north of 250,000 locations remaining. Georgia has well over 200,000 locations remaining.
So little old South Carolina is kicking some butt, y'all, and we're going to be getting broadband done. Quite possibly, we may have investments in place to solve the digital divide this year. So I do want to leave one final thought.
Doing this amount of construction is going to mess some stuff up. You all live on farms, and I'm going to apologize in advance. We've got a lot of construction going on.
Things are going to break here and there. Somebody might lose a few rows of crops along the side of the road as the trenches are coming through and construction is being built. But it's for the greater good, and it's going to lift South Carolina up firmly.
So thank you all for being here, and I know we're going to have some fun talking, so I'm going to get this going. Yeah, and one thing I often say with technology, and I remember doing this in the classroom a lot, when it didn't work, I'd say it's great when it does work. So there will be growing pains with it, but also, obviously, a greater good on the back end of it.
Another thing, Drake, before I introduce you to these guys, this meeting, these conversations, the conversations going on up here, it's our intent among the organizers of this that they spill into the hallways, that they spill into your tables there, and that they continue well after this meeting. That was, as we were putting this thing together, putting the plan together, the topics that we put in place, the panelists that we put in place to discuss those topics, that was the intent in the plan. So I do hope that y'all will continue these conversations with these guys, and with us, and with the folks at your table, or across the room as well.
Drake Pero is a farmer. Among others, Drake wears many hats. I'll let him tell you about all his hats.
But one of his hats is a father, and he's the father of two, right? But one of them was one of my, he was my favorite student. I'm joking.
There's several of my students in the room, but John is his son, on the farm with him now as well. So, Drake, if you'd please introduce yourself. Thank you, Kendall, and thanks everybody for inviting me here.
Ronnie, I can tell a lot of stories about you, but we'll hold off on that because we go way back to the Little League. But anyway, my name is Drake Pero, and I live close to the little town of Cameron, and grew up on a farm. And that farm is, some of the magazines, publications say we're the second oldest continuous farm in the country.
So, a little history there. But I knew what I wanted to do when I grew up. My grandfather told me, he said, son, you go get an education, I'll teach you how to farm.
So I ended up at Walter, like four other generations. Back in those days, that was correct. You know, we didn't have all this new technology, and the way you learned back then was to do it.
There was so much truth to that. When I got out of school, farming was not very good in the 80s. My brother was back on the farm and also teaching school.
So, some summers I had been scouting cotton for counties and all. So I got into crop consulting business. Been doing that for a long time.
I'm not going to tell them the age. And it has grown. We work with cotton, peanuts, corn, and I get a lot of phone calls about a lot of other things too.
So those are the three main growth products that I consult with. Three years ago we got into the drone spraying business, and that has been very successful so far. And I only see that growing.
And then also I own a Cameron Cotton and Seed Company, which is a cotton ginning and warehousing business. I'm very fortunate. I get to see it from planting all the way almost to the uses of the mill when it comes to cotton.
I do wear a lot of hats, but I enjoy every bit of it. Well, and Drake's among looking at the program, I guess, in terms of having that farmer hat. We've got Drake, and then on the next panel we've got another farmer that will be joining us.
I know there's several of you in the room too just looking around. One of the things that I recognized early on with this crowd, we've met a couple times already. These remote meetings, getting to know you and then kicking around what this conversation was going to look like.
One of the things I learned early on was they don't need me. And so the conversations we've had, they were asking each other questions, and it was a dialogue. And largely we've got these questions, but really these are things that I took the things that you guys talked about when we met and I turned them into questions because it was a great conversation.
So I hesitate to say anything. I think I'm done, right? No, I'm joking.
One of the things, Jim, that we have in you on the panel, I think there's a lot of intersection between, and y'all are going to hear this reflected too, it was what was reflected in our conversations. Drake, one of the first questions you had, I think, for Jim was where are we at in terms of broadband development? Jim, you largely answered that in your introduction, so I'm going to spin off to a little different direction.
And how do you – you've got what you've got in terms of what's been developed, but then you've got your plan for where you're going next. And I know you talked about how you eat an elephant was not one bite at a time, but 20 bites at a time. So how do you make that plan?
How do you say where we're going next with broadband development in the state? Well, that's a great question, and that's really our secret sauce in South Carolina is mapping. Having really high-precision analytics has been the thing that has differentiated South Carolina.
I came to ORS from the private sector, and one of the things I did – in fact, hopefully we have a few minutes. I'll show you some slides on the work we did, but we matched up crowdsourced data. Some of you heard about crowdsourced data and how you might use that.
We were one of the – really the innovator in the United States for taking crowdsourced data and overlaying that on top of federal data to get a better result. And so when we fund grants, we're actually funding at a street address level. We are – you know, when you think about doing a puzzle at the dinner table at Christmas time with your family, you're putting puzzle pieces in.
That's the way we approach the state of South Carolina, and we're carefully crafting puzzle pieces that drop onto unserved areas of the state. So a lot of people don't know we're not allowed to make – I'm not allowed to make a single penny of an investment in downtown Columbia or downtown Charleston or Greenville. We have to go to places that have nothing.
So analyzing accurately to find an absence of stuff is a hard thing to do, so that's where the maps come in. So we do custom puzzle pieces. We do everything through competitive grant awards.
People ask me how much money is going to Orangeburg County and how much is going to Colleton and Lee and Hampton. We don't do it that way. All I can do is put out an eligibility map, and then we have a competitive grant process.
But one of the things we did, and with the help of the General Assembly, we taught our Internet providers how to play Pac-Man again. And I say this in a very fun and serious way. You remember playing Pac-Man as a kid?
Some of you – I look over at this table, and they've probably never seen it before. But I take a little Pac-Man with a joystick, and the Pac-Man had to gobble up cherries on this really simple maze. So when I realized we were setting up a competitive grant program, I realized that my team could put the cherries where we want them.
And then we put out the eligibility map, and then we say, ready, set, go. So the General Assembly told us, hey, Jim, put some cherries where the K-12 students are. Put some cherries where there's no Internet service at all, and put some cherries so that's how we prioritize.
And for those of you who run grant programs, that's a great secret. You can achieve the results you want by putting the cherries in the right spots and awarding grant programs that way. And that has paid huge dividends in South Carolina.
Jim, I have one question for you. I told you. Go for it.
When we talk in rural South Carolina, which, you know, this is what we are here for, what percentage of rural South Carolina have broadband right now? Well, that's really tricky. We have, so we brought the number down, like I was telling you, 50,000 residential dots on the map.
And I can tell you one of the things, you know, as a Columbia resident, you know, lower Richland County by Congaree National Park feels pretty doggone rural. But guess what? It's only 15 minutes from the statehouse.
So when you talk rural, defining that the right way is important. But with only 50,000 dots in y'all, that's out of 2. 5 million.
We're bringing it down. You know, for too long we've had the question about what our percentages are, because we've patted ourselves on the back and said, hey, 93% is pretty good. The problem is the raw number of folks that come on that 7% is really large.
So we're down tracking in very low percentages, and it's going quickly. So I think we've done, hopefully, have you all seen the big difference? I could kind of ask the crowd.
Hopefully you're feeling the presence of high-speed Internet coming. I know we've funded projects. Allendale is no longer a laughingstock of the broadband map, I can tell you.
Allendale is close to being rebuilt. Bamberg, Collins, and Hampton are places. Specific examples, McCormick County, I think there's less than 30 homes in McCormick County remaining.
Florida County is just about done. So, you know, we're counting dots now. It's crazy, and there's been such huge progress in the state of South Carolina.
So I kind of danced around your question. I definitely answered it. But when we start talking about the farming community, with all the new technology that's coming out, of course, we need broadband.
And luckily we have it now. And I can already see a difference. And, you know, people like Doug that can solve problems for us, if we need something done, write a program or whatever, he's the man to go to.
And I'm going to let him state what he can do for farming. Is that all? That should be easy.
Thank you for having such faith in me. We only met a few weeks ago. Well, yeah, I'd like to help as much as possible.
I guess the idea, you know, when I hear things like broadband, and, oh, broadband is a jargon, when you talk about something as general as that, you know, I go to it. Sorry, I got to ask that. And that's what I think we can explore through the programs that we do, figuring out how you actually capitalize on very high-speed connectivity.
It's easy to understand from a residential standpoint, because everybody knows when they can stream their movies quickly and get online when all their kids are on the Xbox at the same time. But how that applies to farming and all the technologies that you use and all the Internet of Things and all this other jargon, these things are explored by subject matter experts. You're a subject matter expert in broadband.
You're a subject matter expert in agriculture. I'm probably somewhat of a subject matter expert in programmatically figuring out how to set up something that can explore these things in a really direct and efficient way. So, yeah, I would say that it's very important to have in place systems that can look at the application of these technologies.
Events, getting the right people, sort of hacking at ways of using all that bandwidth that you're paying for in events and in other ways, in special project groups. I'm very passionate about, I don't know if everybody knows what hackathons are. Especially just tech people that seem to know that word and everybody else thinks their bank accounts are at risk.
I bring that up from us now, at least not from us. But, yeah, so I'm a big fan of hackathons. I could probably use up all the time talking about them, but I definitely think having an idea of how you can integrate technology programmatically is very important right there.
I think it's important, too, to talk more about hackathons and the opportunity they can present. But one thing's for certain, and Doug, I think you said it well, we see some drone businesses, spray drone and imaging drone businesses in the ag space now, and I frankly worry a little bit about the ones that don't have an agronomist on their team or don't have somebody that can give them that agronomic insight. So, Doug, one of the things that we've talked about, and I do want you to, if you can briefly tell us, what does a hackathon look like?
I would like to see that. But also, how do we do a good job? And this is for everybody, I want you to tell us about a hackathon.
How do we get these guys with the appropriate, these technologists, with the appropriate subject matter experts so that you can really build a strong and valuable team? They each bring different gifts to the table. How do you marry, how do you force that marriage, so to speak?
That's an excellent question. In fact, I think the most important thing are the teams and the people. People are the most important thing, period, and full stop.
Getting people that, together, and I'll sort of describe how this happens within some kind of event, an aggregating event, an event which gets all the people that you need to have in the same room together. That's basically, you use the word secret sauce, a secret sauce of a hackathon. So basically, the objective is to solve something.
If you have, you're going to have a unique problem, Drake's going to have a unique problem that he'd like to be more productive on, or save money, or save time, or, you know, and that becomes a problem statement. And then, in a hackathon, you basically have a team formation night where you'll have software developers, you'll have project managers, subject matter experts like Drake or Jim, and they'll get together and basically, for one very concentrated period of time, work on that problem. You absolutely need subject matter experts in that team.
You need somebody who understands it backwards and forwards, and then you need somebody who has the technical ability to address it with software or hardware, depending on the event. The deliverable, at the end, is, it's sort of, it's an award. You have the same, you have subject matter experts on the judging side as well, who then evaluate what you've come up with, and decide how much merit it has, and just like all these, any kind of event you've ever been to, whether awards and prizes and things like that, those are judged by the right people.
And then you have, it's a way of piloting an idea, it's a very stark idea with both business accelerators, which are farther down the line, and hackathons, which are the very book end on this side. But this is where you get to play around with new technology, you get to figure out what everybody needs, and what feels worthwhile to work on, and you actually get direct feedback in a very short period of time. Yeah, it was funny, when we were talking to Drake, you were saying, hey, we should do a hackathon on your farm.
Because, you know, one of the great things about being an entrepreneur is the lesson that you learn is you don't know what you don't know. You know, you have some subject matter background, but, you know, as I was talking to Drake, I was saying, hey, do you guys, have you used, set up a mesh network on your farm so you don't have to use all that cellular bandwidth? And then you were saying, like, what the heck is that?
So, you know, Drake didn't know this, but he got an intern, a volunteer intern, to come work on the farm. I, you know, one of the things about getting old is, I had a bucket list, I wanted to ride in a combine. He said, Jim, you can come on down.
So I want to do that, but I want to learn, and maybe bring, you know, just a fresh set of eyes to a problem. But we started talking about having an outdoor, outdoor Wi-Fi instead of trying to run off the cell phone. It was funny, we did talk about this a lot, and when I got home that night, I said, this would really be great.
And then I started thinking, I said, well, where could I use it? How would it improve things? Well, number one, it popped up in my mind, in the drone business.
You know, I do a lot of imagery on crops. Well, we have satellite imagery that a lot of companies now have, and that we can get. Well, how often does that satellite come around and take that picture?
Not very often, maybe a week. Where we can do it in ten minutes. Now, with broadband, we'll even, we'll lessen that time even more.
And then I said, well, that's on that side. On the gin side, I don't know how many of you are very familiar with cotton gins, but every bale of cotton is, we take a sample out of it and it's sent to be classed. And I see within the next, probably ten years, each cotton gin will have their own classing mechanism right there.
Now, we're going to need help with that. You say, why do we need to do that? Well, if I know the grade of that cotton before I put it in the warehouse, I can make it and put all those bales with the very close grades in the same spot.
And when the mills call for a certain grade of cotton, it'll be right there together. And how much time would that save, and people, and money? I mean, it would be huge.
So, I mean, that's just two examples. And when you look at on the farming side of it, I was telling these guys, you know, you want to drive a combine, we've got some room in the combine, but on a tractor, you've got five monitors sitting there, you hardly have any room for anybody else. But we'll make room for y'all, I promise that.
But where does all this technology, I mean, where is it? From when I started with it up until now, it's grown tremendously. But we still have a long way to go.
You know, they do a great job at Clemson. And some of the ideas he's had have really helped me. John comes home from school with all these ideas.
I said, well, who's going to pay for all this? But it pays for itself. It does not take long.
And I think that's where these guys really come in and show the practicality of it. And yes, it is worthwhile. Or, no, that's going to cost too much at this point in time.
So, you know, when we start talking about agriculture, you know, we need these guys. Because we have to have somebody to write and observe it and see if it's practical for the farm. And that's why I've invited both of these guys to come spend the summer with me every day.
And sun up and sun down. And see what it's really like. You're not even going to charge them, are you?
Yeah. Great guys. It's really fun.
Let's talk this out, because I think you get a good idea. So you've got a problem of grading cotton bales. We could turn this into a hackathon.
And, you know, I'm looking over with all our great student minds from FFA and stuff like that. I mean, wouldn't this be fun to show up at Drake's Farm and really work a problem through to solution? But, you know, my friends at SCRA, I know they could host a hackathon competition.
And we could probably find ten farmers in the state. We could have a little competition going on to find the best outcome. You know, Laurie, would you kind of like to sponsor that idea?
See how we got the juice going? But, you know, that's how we would do it. You get a team for 48 hours to show up?
Yeah, it really gets things moving. You need momentum, because as much as I like presentations and talking about these things, having people actually work on them, devoting. .
. You're going to be talking to the most ambitious students, probably the people you absolutely want to hire. You know, FYI.
They're literally going to be devoting a weekend for a pretty small prize when you consider their efforts, if they win. And it's not really about that. And that's one reason we don't usually.
. . We try not to say how much a prize would be.
The experience itself is tremendously important. And the connections, the people that you work with, people in communities that are smaller, you're probably going to see again. If you're going to be in the same industry, you're going to see them again.
And you'll have history. You'll have worked together on something that you guys believe in. And this is not only for the students, because you'll have people who.
. . We've had early, mid, late career people who just want to sharpen their tools and work on something that they're not sure of the outcome.
They just think it's something important. I'm always very supportive of any kind of prototyping event or even sort of investigating the feasibility of some technology that you want to consider. You've got to know whether.
. . Just because it's new, just because it's available, doesn't mean it's right.
And it may not be the right solution. But how are you going to know unless you kind of hack on to this? And in my opinion, you have to live it.
I mean, you have to experience it. It really irritates me with some very large companies. These people that sit in the office all day and they're making decisions that affect us tremendously and don't have a clue of what's going on on the farm or in rural America.
I mean, you think about it. You know, the presentation during lunch talking about all the pesticides and fungicides and all that. Do you know how long it takes for a fungicide or a pesticide to get cleared by the EPA in this country?
About 19 years. 19 years. I mean, and that's ridiculous.
It is totally ridiculous. I know we've got to have, you know, get everything made sure it's straight. But it could go too far, and I think in some cases we've gotten to that point.
But, you know, I think down the road things are going to get better. They're going to get faster due to these guys. But like I originally said, these people have to be on the farm and in the fields to experience exactly what we do.
Now, I'll say every farm is different. Every cotton gin is different. So it's all unique, but in the end we all want the same thing.
So, I mean, we could come together and come up with a solution. I do want to, in about five minutes we'll open the floor up. But I know one thing that we had all talked about that y'all just started going with it in our meeting.
The next topic, one of the things we talked about, and Jim, you made a statement and I wrote it down, I'm going to get a t-shirt or a mug made for you, that you don't want to build that bridge to nowhere. And so that's a question I have. With the broadband development, with new dug opportunities for software developers in the ag space, and then Drake with new opportunities to adopt technologies because of this new connectivity.
Drake's using connected technologies. Make no mistake, but a lot of what Drake's doing is cellular technology. And what Jim can bring to Drake is a lot more speed and a lot more reliability.
I want to talk about this road to nowhere. How do we encourage and ensure adoption of technologies that leverage new connectivity opportunities in the state? You know, that's such a great thing.
And honestly, the General Assembly and the Governor and everybody else are going to get mad at the Broadband Office if we make really expensive investments in infrastructure that doesn't get used. As we are compelled by the federal government to lean in to get Internet for all, and I use 100. 0% of the homes as the goal, there's a real danger there.
If we start building fiber bridges to barrier islands with one home, or it might be a hunting lodge that's seldom used, where it's the house up on the side of the mountain, and guess what? That resident doesn't even want Internet. The whole reason they built it on the side of the mountain is because they don't want it.
So as we chase dots, we have to be really smart. We're doing some things. I'm really, really proud.
We are working on an agreement with Starlink. There are some locations where, quite honestly, we don't want to build fiber there because the permitting is so sensitive, some of the low-country coastal areas, but also it just might take time. One of the phrases I use is In some cases, it's going to take us 3, 4 years to get fiber, a business location, but guess what?
If we drop Starlink on it, I could have it up in a couple hours, and then we can build fiber to it later, but I can have that resident, that student, or that family farm can get connectivity now, and then we can improve it later. So we're doing a lot of things like that to save the state money, get it done more rapidly, but we're watching every single dot to make sure we don't go crazy. How much money does it cost?
To give you a sense of broadband economics, one mile of buried fiber is currently costing $80,000. One mile of telephone pole. .
. There's two primary ways of getting fiber. Underground, $80,000.
Attaching to a telephone pole is about $50,000 a mile. To give you an idea, telephone pole attachments are more rapid, but guess what? Underground is more resilient, so when we look at hurricane areas and things like that, we've got to be thoughtful, but it's very expensive, and so that's why you want to make sure people use it.
And I will tell you, too, just touching on the affordability topic, we want to make sure that as we install this stuff that the residents and the businesses can actually afford once it gets there. You also have to have some kind of foresight to know whether or not you're going to be able to use that if that's appropriate for your farm or for whatever purpose that I was saying earlier. Residential is pretty obvious when you run into bottlenecks, but if you're not doing live video streams or something, I think it's important to kind of think in those terms, like, what is the thing that I'm going to need to do that only broadband or only whatever the technology is can afford?
It would be great to pilot that in some fashion, or at least see if the problems, like Drake would have the problem statement, right? He'd say, you know, I'm trying to look at, trying to sort of survey a large area, and what I really need is like a live feed or something or something that takes a lot of bandwidth. My current cellular connection is not able to do that.
I'm just thinking of it just sort of a random example. It's much easier to not build a bridge to nowhere when you have piloted it in some way. And break it, you know, see where the limitations are.
And these predictive AI models for, let's say, crop management or livestock management decisions, these types of things, these are all data supported. And the more data you can feed them, not all data is valuable data, but it sorts out what's valuable and what's not. The more data you can feed these things, the better these predictive management models will be.
And, Doug, until we have that ability to play in that sandbox, it's hard to see what the real benefit might be. I'm going to turn it to these guys. We didn't get through, maybe we got through a quarter of the questions we had down.
And so we've got more. Don't worry if y'all don't have any. But I suspect y'all have got some questions from these guys.
Or did we feed you too much lunch? There we go. You got a couple in the back.
Thank you, Jerry. By the way, Jerry, as he's walking back there, you see this logo that's coming up here? The logo here and the one that will be on these screens in a second, Jerry, he'll tell you he didn't create that logo.
And technically he didn't, but he trained the AI that did create it. So here we are at this Ag Tech and Business Conference, and we used a ton of technology to put together the things that are in place here. Yeah, so maybe Jerry could answer that.
His team was the winning team of our Harbor Hack at the College of Charleston for their, I might even say, their beekeeping solutions. I think that he's being modest. I think that the audience and the judges really appreciated the mission, the idea of empowering small-beak backyard beekeepers, and it was understandable.
The solution that they came up with was an understandable method, and they presented it really well. So, yeah, to answer your question in a broader sense, projects like Hyper and Waterworks and the other projects that we've done that were competitive, they're a start. Whether Jerry decides to commercialize at some point, I mean, if that's their trajectory, let's try every way to support that we can and continue to go through all different steps, sort of keep validating the idea and keep getting momentum.
It's a very productive process. You're going to have a lot of people with a lot of ideas, and most of them won't fly, which is fine. That's what it's designed for.
It's designed to come up with ideas and see what comes out the bottom of the funnel, and hopefully with enough funnels you get some really important things. And the way they did it, so the team formation night that I mentioned before, his teammate stood up in front of a hundred and something people and started to talk about B. This wasn't pretty much hackathons tend to focus on humanitarian goals, and he got a lot of people talking and saying, oh, I like that project, I want to work on it.
So it's amazing, like, all the different skills that you get, standing up and saying this is something that I want to work on, who else? Who's with me? You may not be a software developer or a UX UI guy, tech person or whatever, but if you can convince them, then they'll join your team, and all of a sudden you'll have some kind of software solution needed to be looked at or people thought was important.
So I'm happy to share it with you. Brandy, it reminds me a lot of the call for code, the way that you guys put teams together with your IBM operation there as well. Ritu, did you have a question?
I saw your hand up. Hi, I'm Ritu Varna Balaji from Advent Innovations. I had a question regarding, you know, where do you envision South Carolina, especially in the broadband realm, going in, for example, like 10 years from now, compared to the other states in the U.
S. ? It's such a fun question to answer, actually.
I am extremely proud of where we are, where we're positioned and how well the state has rallied our Internet service providers, but what really, you know, hits me is when the state of Hawaii called and the state of Vermont called and Utah, and they're calling us and asking for our help. I can't tell you how great that is. I actually know all of the 50 state broadband directors now personally.
We've all gotten to be really good friends over this huge federal thing, but South Carolina is well-known nationally. But it's, you know, this infrastructure thing is just the tip of the iceberg. I've got to put this to bed so you all can do your thing, because it's going to count on all of us leaning in to lift up the economy of South Carolina so that we can all live the best versions of our own lives.
But my question to you all, I'm going to flip it back and say, what are you going to do once this digital divide is zero? That's my challenge to you guys, and that's going to be the end of this year. You need to have an answer for that, because guess what?
We're almost there. Isn't that cool? Jim's going to say, I built it.
It's y'all's turn. Get to work. I did my work.
Another point around technology, well, I'm not even going to say it. I will if we have time. But do we have more questions?
We have questions for Drake, drone spraying business. There we go. We've got one.
From a sustainability standpoint, we've got all of this stuff. We've put all this fiber out. But progression of technology, we started with the telephone, then we have DSL, and then we have cable, and we have fiber.
Like, do we know what's next? How long is this going to last? We've put all of these miles of all of this infrastructure in, and, you know, like your old cell phones won't work for 3G, won't work on a 5G network.
Like, how long is this going to be good for before we go through this process again? What an awesome question, and I'll help a little bit with that. Fiber is called future-proof technology.
Yeah, I've heard that before. What's cool about fiber is once you get the fiber in the ground, you can upgrade the speed by replacing the electronics on both ends. The fiber itself doesn't have to change.
So it's very resilient. It doesn't degrade like copper does. You know, DSL, copper gets old in the ground.
Fiber doesn't. It's insulated from lightning strikes, things like that. So it's way, way, way more better.
But that being said, if you attach it to a telephone pole in the low country, guess what? Next storm that goes through, it's going to get wiped out. So we've got to be careful how we install it, you know, balancing all the engineering objectives.
Get it underground where it needs to be, get it overhead. Another really cool example, how many of you have heard of Santee Cooper? Right?
Did you all know Santee Cooper has 1,200 miles of fiber in the air? On all of the high-tension lines that go through the farms, I was talking to the folks at the farms. Santee Cooper power lines currently touch 36 counties.
There's fiber up there, and we're looking at making a transformation investment in that to activate that for use by the state. So there's really, really cool stuff going on. Ronnie's got a question over here.
I'm going to borrow your mic. Secretary Perdue came here with the governor, and I left Bowman that day, Jim, and I am naive. I love technology, but I'm naive.
Stimulus money put fiber optics into my part of Orangeburg County early on. We rock and roll at home. When I pull out of my yard, I'm dead.
That affects our tractors and so forth. I mean, how do we cure that kind of problem, wireless problem? Again, fiber speaks to that.
Let me use this mic stand as an example. You've all seen the cellular towers on the sides of the roads. Guess what?
Out of every cell phone tower, you have to have fiber optic cable. It doesn't work without it. So guess what?
If we don't have fiber in our rural areas, we can't put in new cell phone towers. So one of my not-so-hidden agenda items is to fix cell phone service at the same time. So by getting this fiber pushed out into our rural areas, we're going to have the fiber in the right places so that we don't make trade ban.
All right, Spencer's got a question. After this, if you all have closing remarks, we can do that, or if you all would rather take it, Bollie, another question. Spencer McLeod here.
I want to say thanks to the fiber. We definitely have the benefit from it. But now I kind of want to flip it a little bit.
So I got the fiber, and I shot at my pump stations and my warehouse, and I got cameras, and it was a beautiful thing. We hung our PLCs on it, and we hung this infrastructure. It's opened up a whole other world.
But now I'm at a stop where the things I need connected have to have low power, and it has to be wireless, and it doesn't need a lot of bandwidth. It doesn't need to stream a YouTube video. What is the solution for that?
I've heard CADM1, I guess. You're talking broadly about this class of stuff called the Internet of Things. You've got Coke machines out there that talk to the Internet.
You've got pumps. You have video cameras. You have water quality sensors that are out there, and how do you connect them?
There's no one way to do it. You can do it with Wi-Fi, certainly. If you can, you know, just like college campuses, good example, outdoor spaces in college campuses.
You know how kids can walk around, flip open their laptop in the middle of a courtyard? That's with Wi-Fi with a mesh network. You know, I was talking to Drake about setting up a mesh network on his farm.
You need power to power those antennas, but they can all talk together. So that would be an option for you is getting a mesh network working. Yes, cell phone service is another way, you know, 3G, 4G.
So lots of different options, but that's the edge of the network that you're trying to connect. Bluetooth technology even is reaching a lot farther, like the drone ID tags. What is it?
I don't remember the distance it would go to, but it surprised me. So it's a ability. Jim mentioned the Internet of Things, home automation.
You guys have it in your homes. You've got a ring doorbell or you've got a thermostat. I do this with my wife all the time.
She doesn't have the app, so she'll get up and change the thermostat. I'm pretty cheap, so I'll put it back where I had it. And it automatically does it every four hours, regardless of if I'm paying attention or not.
So she has to wake up pretty often to put it where she wants it. That's what Spencer wants on the farm, home automation for the farm operations, for the grain bin, for the irrigation, for the fertilizer injection, whatever the things are, the gee whiz golly gizmos that are out there. Drake, you want to wrap us up here?
Just talking about that, and I think that was a great question. And I was having the same problem at Cotton Jack because I need to talk to every piece of machinery in there. So what we set up was a radio from one building to the other, and that has worked beautifully.
We got that too. Now what I'm finding is all those places with power, they've got internet now. But it's now where I've gotten so excited about it, and I love the connectivity, and I need the soil moisture in the middle of this field.
I want a hundred of them, and I don't want to pay $10 or $15 a month. As I was looking into stuff like LoRaWAN, I was just asking what do you think the future is for those edge networks, I guess. Once he gets to my farm and gets it done, then I'll tell you how it works.
I think he volunteered to be the pilot project. Well, he'll have Jim there as an intern all summer, so I think that will work pretty well. Y'all have been awesome.
And I was standing over here chit-chatting with Ronnie the whole time. I don't know if y'all noticed. I knew that y'all would run this on your own, and the questions have been great.
We're going to end a little bit earlier because these breaks that we've given y'all haven't been quite long enough today, but please join me in thanking this diverse group. And for you guys and the rest of the panelists and the rest of the guest speakers, if you haven't already heard or been made aware, we've got some gifts for y'all from each of the host organizations. There's bags on the left as you go out with your name on them.
And if they're missing, it's because somebody else wanted it more than you did. So we're going to take about a five, ten-minute break somewhere in that range. Please continue these conversations into the hallway, into the bathroom, wherever it is you go with them.
Carry on beyond this meeting, please. Thank you.