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Abstract. Agriculture faces many challenges to continue past trends of crop productivity improvement in the presence of increased losses due to adverse weather, diseases caused by pathogens and pests, limitations on fertilizers and fuel, and a general need to improve sustainability. At the same time, an increasing world population adds more pressure to increase yield productivity with limited land and water. Digital agriculture offers a broad list of technologies and solutions to increase yield productivity by granting farmers more control over their operations via precision agriculture and data-driven tools that support decision-making to optimize resource usage in all kinds of operations. However, rural areas often lack adequate communications infrastructure to sustain automated data collection pipelines. As a result, vast amounts of data are often lost, undermining the effectiveness of digital agriculture applications.

Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) have been used in applications where mainstream communication channels are not available or work with low performance. In this paper, we propose and simulate a DTN that takes advantage of the movement of regular agricultural machinery operations, using a fleet of edge-computers capable of establishing peer-to-peer wireless links with in-field static edge-computers. The DTN was simulated using location data recorded from planting operations in multiple fields using the Opportunistic Network Environment (ONE) simulator with three routing algorithms. Message delivery rates between 0.31 and 0.7, with latencies varying from 3180 and 7040 seconds under different simulation scenarios were obtained. Lastly, we present pathways for developing a message propagation and routing scheme adaptable to the dynamic nature of agricultural operations.