  Global food security is an issue that is fast becoming a critical matter in
the world today. Global warming, climate change and a range of other impacts
caused by humans, such as carbon emissions, sociopolitical and economical
challenges (e.g. war), traditional workforce/labour decline and population
growth are straining global food security. The need for high-speed and reliable
wireless communication in agriculture is becoming more of a necessity rather
than a technological demonstration or showing superiority in the field.
Governments and industries around the world are seeing more urgency in
establishing communication infrastructure to scale up agricultural activities
and improve sustainability, by employing autonomous agri-robotics and
agri-technologies. The work presented here evaluates the physical performance
of 5G in an agri-robotics application, and the results are compared against 4G
and WiFi6 (a newly emerging wireless communication standard), which are
typically used in agricultural environments. In addition, a series of
simulation experiments were performed to assess the ``real-time'' operational
delay in critical tasks that may require a human-in-the-loop to support
decision making. The results lead to the conclusion that 4G cannot be used in
the agricultural domain for applications that require high throughput and
reliable communication between robot and user. Moreover, a single wireless
solution does not exist for the agricultural domain, but instead multiple
solutions can be combined to meet the necessary telecommunications
requirements. Finally, the results show that 5G greatly outperforms 4G in all
performance metrics, and on average only 18.2ms slower than WiFi6 making it
very reliable.
