The LoRa Alliance®, the open, non-profit organization defining, evolving and promoting the LoRaWAN® standard, announced today that LoRaWAN has become the connectivity method of choice for smart agriculture, from single farms to national programs.
Agriculture is one of the hardest environments in the world to connect because its fields, animals, and other assets sit far beyond the reach of main power or reliable networks.
“LoRaWAN is winning in the Smart Agriculture market for one simple reason: it reaches where farming actually happens,” said Alper Yegin, CEO of the LoRa Alliance. “As the LPWAN technology with the highest accessibility, most robust ecosystem support, and widest global adoption, it can connect to a remote field, a moving herd, or an entire estate and address unique applications without the cost and complexity of cellular, Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.”
Built for the way farms work
LoRaWAN has already become a fourth pillar among wireless IoT connectivity technologies, complementing cellular, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. Yet, the following strengths suit Smart Agriculture better than any other LPWAN technology:
- Long range. A single gateway covers miles/kilometers-wide fields and pastures.
- Low power. Sensors and tags run for years on small or solar batteries.
- Low cost. It uses free, unlicensed spectrum, so there are no SIMs, spectrum fees, or per-device data plans.
- Highest accessibility. For distributed outdoor sites, it is more convenient to deploy than cellular, Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. Farmers can roll out their own networks in remote regions, far from existing infrastructure.
- Satellite-backed. Where terrestrial coverage runs out, satellite-connected LoRaWAN extends the same network to the most remote fields.
- Most robust ecosystem. More than 650 LoRaWAN Certified devices from more than 334 LoRa Alliance members give growers the broadest range of sensors and gateways of any LPWAN technology.
- Widest global adoption: More than 125 million devices were connected worldwide via LoRaWAN at the end of 2025.
Four farms, four wins
These strengths have already enabled LoRa Alliance member companies to address emerging Smart Agriculture opportunities with unique applications that provide real benefits to agriculture businesses and their customers. Application examples:
Catching disease early (Ghana and Brazil). The Banalytics project, supported by Lacuna Space, uses satellite-connected LoRaWAN sensors to detect Black Sigatoka, the world’s most damaging banana disease, before symptoms spread. Around 10 instrumented plants per hectare, equivalent to roughly four per acre, track temperature and humidity, soil-nutrient sensors sit on a 50-meter grid, or 165-foot grid, while AI imaging flags early onset. Data from one monitored hectare, around 2.5 acres, extends across the wider growing area, helping growers cut unnecessary fungicide and protect yield in remote regions where conventional networks do not reach.
Tracking livestock across open country (Australia). MooField fits lightweight GPS ear tags, each under 30 grams and solar-powered, to cattle ranging across wide grazing land. Built on RAKwireless LoRaWAN gateways with solar batteries and remote management, the tags give farmers real-time herd location without mains power or daily searches. No other LPWAN technology can support a scenario where gateways sit in the middle of a property where there is no electricity, and the network still reaches the herd wherever it roams. The team is now exploring satellite backhaul to cover even larger roaming areas.
Cutting labor on a durian estate (Malaysia). On a durian estate of more than 80 hectares, MIE Agro Farm deployed more than 20 LoRaWAN soil sensors from Seeed Studio across 6,000 trees. Durian demands tight temperature and humidity control, and managers previously spent two hours a day checking trees on foot. Real-time soil and environmental data, on sensors lasting beyond three years with gateway coverage up to 10 km, replaced those daily walks, freed staff for plant-health work and built the estate’s first data benchmark for durian cultivation.
Optimizing water on open fields (Bulgaria). A large-scale producer of watermelons and cabbages struggled with under-watering and over-watering across wide fields. Loren Networks deployed TELTELIC KIWI agriculture sensors measuring soil moisture, temperature, humidity and light, feeding a single platform that growers monitor from a phone. With real-time field data replacing guesswork, water is matched to each area’s actual needs, improving crop health while cutting cost and waste. The rugged sensors carry up to 10 years of battery life for minimal maintenance.
And the span goes much wider. On a single LoRaWAN network, growers can run soil moisture, temperature and nutrient monitoring, precision irrigation and valve control, weather and microclimate stations, frost and storm alerts, and greenhouse or polytunnel climate control.
The same network can also support water management across reservoirs, tanks, troughs, pumps and flow meters, as well as animal-health monitoring, grain silo and cold-store conditions, fuel and tank levels, and fence, gate and equipment security.
It can even extend to beehive and pollination monitoring, and aquaculture water quality.
Because LoRaWAN is an open standard, a farm can start with a single application and add more over time on the same network, with no new infrastructure.
“The opportunity in Smart Agriculture is to turn isolated fields into connected, intelligent environments,” added Yegin. “When environmental data becomes action, agriculture gets more productive, more sustainable and more resilient, at scale.”
Learn more
The LoRa Alliance will explore these deployments and the ROI behind them in a free webinar, “Precision at Scale: Where LoRaWAN® Wins in Agriculture,” on July 8, 2026 from 17:00 to 18:00 CEST (11 a.m. to 12 p.m. EDT). Speakers from Lacuna Space, WIKA, Emergent, Decent Lab and Seeed Studio, with guest speaker Robert Morrison of the Agri-Tech Centre, will examine the business case across soil, water and crop systems. Registration is open on the LoRa Alliance website.
About the LoRa Alliance®
The LoRa Alliance® is an open, nonprofit association that develops and promotes the LoRaWAN standard and product certification program. With the highest accessibility, most robust ecosystem, and widest global adoption of any LPWAN technology, LoRaWAN is the leading IoT LPWAN standard and an essential fourth pillar of global wireless connectivity, complementing cellular, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. The LoRa Alliance has become one of the largest and fastest-growing alliances in the technology sector since its inception in 2015. More information: http://lora-alliance.org.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260707585513/en/
Media gallery
