Mobile internet coverage could help farmers whose tractors stalled due to a satellite outage this week – but phone coverage is so patchy in regional Australia that many will remain stalled.
The British-owned Inmarsat I-4 F1 satellite, which supports the GPS systems in agricultural machinery from brands including Ag Leader, Case, John Deere, and Trimble in the Asia-Pacific, was down for 12 hours this week, causing a flurry of concerned calls from Australian farmers. Most modern tractors rely on GPS for automatic steering. The satellite enables guided accuracy and self-drive within two centimetres for tasks such as sowing crops.
Michael Casey, the general manager of agriculture cooperative company Vantage NSW, said that farmers with a cellular modem – like a 5G connection – in their cab were still able to connect to the GPS system, while those who did not have mobile internet were not. The outage only affected the satellite that sends the correction signal – which corrects errors in GPS mapping and allows tractors to be self-driving – and the broader network remained intact.
“So if you could find an alternative way to get that correction signal or another correction signal to that machine, then you could maintain the high-accuracy operation,” Casey said.
“In some cases, if they had a cellular modem, we were able to feed them the correction through, say, a hotspot in their phone.
“If it was older equipment and it didn’t have connectivity, then you had to revert back to what we call uncorrected, which will still allow you to perform the functions but it doesn’t place the machinery in the field in the exact location that you need. So you kind of lose some efficiency.”
Casey said farmers required accurate GPS information to reduce soil compaction and support crop growth.
He said he and his team have been pushing for customers to add cellular connectivity to their machines.
“That’s what’s enabled us to get ourselves and a lot of customers out of trouble,” he said. “You’re not coming in from satellite, you’re coming in from the internet.”
“So although you still require satellites for positioning, the particular correctional satellite becomes redundant if you have the stream coming in over an internet feed.”
While this solution seems simple, it’s limited by Australia’s poor network coverage. If service is patchy and unable to be reached on your property, this alternative would be redundant.
The NSW Farmers association said the reliance on technology had brought efficiencies, but it also made the industry vulnerable.
“As a society and as an industry we’re looking to technological advances to boost productivity and make us more efficient, but we’re seeing some clear examples of how quickly the wheels can fall off when something simple goes wrong,” a NSW Farmers spokesperson said.
“This situation with the GPS outage affected farmers across the country, but then you’ve got mobile phone outages that affect whole regions, or banking outages that bring business to a halt. It’s a major problem we need to come to terms with and really harden ourselves against.”
Jock Graham, who farms near Gundagai, said that when you look at the screen on most farm machinery that relies on this technology you can see 15 different satellites listed. “So I guess from a regular farmer’s point of view, we probably didn’t realise that it needed just the main one, and that those other ones were supplementary,” he said.
Graham’s tractor was down for three days during the peak of sowing season, where each day of delays costs money. He is hoping the system is improved so it won’t happen again.
“I’d like to see obviously redundancy in the system, so should there be an outage in one satellite, there’s a secondary way it can work that keeps everything online,” he said. “Because in this day and age, that’s what everyone has to do to keep their systems up and running. So I’m not sure why in 2023 this is not something they thought of.”
Emily Middleton is a journalist in Gilgandra, NSW
