5 Apogee 360s
1,000 Acres
This large working university farm uses large-scale connectivity for IOT sensors, robotics, drones and farm workers.
How Aura Wireless Connected 1,000 Acres at Prairie View A&M’s Smart Agriculture Lab
Prairie View A&M University wanted to turn its 1,000-acre farm into a smart agriculture lab, but traditional networks couldn’t keep up with the scale—or the budget.
On the farm at Prairie View A&M University, ambition was never the problem. Students and researchers wanted to put smart agriculture into practice: IoT sensors buried in the soil, RFID tags on livestock, drones sweeping over fields, robotics reducing labor, Wi-Fi-enabled devices in the hands of farm workers. The problem was simple but crippling—no network could cover it all.
One thousand acres. That’s the canvas. Trying to fill it with legacy access points would have taken hundreds of units, an impossible cost for a university, and an even bigger nightmare to manage. Every new access point would mean more maintenance, more complexity, more time fixing problems instead of learning, experimenting, and farming.
That’s when Prairie View A&M turned to Cloud Ingenuity. As an Authorized System Integrator of Aura Wireless, they didn’t bring a stack of hardware. They brought a new way of thinking about coverage. Working with Aura, they installed just five Apogee 360 antennas. Five antennas for one thousand acres. Coverage that blanketed the farm from fence line to fence line.
The effect was immediate. Sensors came online and stayed online. Drones sent back high-resolution imagery in real time. Students in the fields connected their devices without waiting or walking back to the barns. Professors had visibility into every acre without blind spots. The farm stopped working around its network and started building on it.
Jason Claybrook put it plainly: “This wasn’t about adding more access points. It was about making the network work at scale. Five Apogee 360s covered what would have taken hundreds of legacy AP locations. Less hardware. Less complexity. More reliability. That’s how you make technology usable in agriculture.”
For Prairie View A&M, it wasn’t just about getting Wi-Fi. It was about proving that smart agriculture can thrive even when budgets are tight. With Cloud Ingenuity and Aura Wireless, the farm became more than a lab. It became a working example of how technology and agriculture can move forward together—efficient, connected, and ready for the future.