Resilient Tactical Edge Networks

SBIR topic OSW27BZ02-DV005 (U.S. Department of Defense – Office of the Secretary of Defense), Phase I and II. Open to U.S. small businesses. Opens: December 2, 2026. Closes: January 6, 2027. The realistic near-to-mid-term serviceable addressable market for private 5G in U.S. agriculture is the subset with real mobility, coverage, reliability, or data-volume pain: row-crop operations running GPS-guided and autonomous equipment, specialty-crop growers using machine vision and agricultural robotics, dairies and feedlots with dense livestock-monitoring deployments, irrigated operations with distributed pump and center-pivot control, and large ranches requiring wide-area coverage for animal and asset tracking. The scale of the opportunity is well documented. USDA Economic Research Service data show about 1.88 million farms in 2024 (roughly 39% of all U.S. land). Only 79% of farms reported internet access of any kind, leaving roughly one in five farms without even basic connectivity. There is also documented evidence that productivity of farms with connectivity is significantly higher than the ones without any connectivity. Furthermore, FCC data show that 39% of rural Americans lack access to minimum fixed broadband speeds, compared with 4% of urban Americans, and coverage on cropland and rangeland specifically is worse still. Public carrier networks will not close this gap on their own; carrier tower economics favor population density, and most agricultural land has almost none. This segment buys on measurable operational outcomes (machine uptime, yield per acre, input cost per acre, water use, herd health, labor hours saved), not on global platform standardization, and its stated barriers to adoption are consistent and compounding: ROI ambiguity, high capex against tight and cyclical farm margins, no in-house RF/cellular or IT staff, harsh outdoor operating environments, a fragmented device ecosystem spanning tractors, drones, sensors, and wearables, and coverage…