More private 5G for you, while I’m on a roll. RCR has covered the Cargill story for years, and news about its 50-site rollout has been doing the rounds; but the story is between the lines – about how it has gone from zero to 50 in six months as the consequence of a strategy reset. Rob Greiner, who has steered the project for Cargill over five years, knows very well how private 5G gets stuck. So his commentary is illuminating – and splinters the old sales crutch that you need a master application to swing the business case. 

As written, for Cargill, the inflection point was not a killer robot or marquee workload, but a philosophical shift – away from hunting perfect ROI-ready pilots towards treating private 5G as foundational infrastructure. The comparison is not with a glittering Industry 4.0 demo, but with Wi-Fi: ubiquitous, expected, and justified in aggregate, not in isolation. The argument gets a little tangled in chicken-and-egg dynamics. The goal is to stack Industry 4.0 use cases, in the end – as it always has been, as has always been discussed. 

The difference, according to the Cargill experience, is that enterprises have to think bigger to get to that point – to accept that they will stack. Light it up, and let it roll – is the penny-drop. Accept, as well, that 5G is just a better technology for Industry 4.0. Which sounds like a leap of faith for a manufacturing company, even a big one, to gamble on an expensive network, especially when it already has one. It is probably also easier after some years of trial and error, research and outreach. Which is what the Cargill team has done. 

So maybe the message is to trust their experience – which is being mirrored and multiplied across industrial sectors, and starting to look like a proper movement. Anyway, fascinating stuff; and Cargill now looks like the bellwether for private 5G, delivered on usable and scalable systems – arguably even ahead of John Deere and Airbus.