Smart Agriculture IoT: LoRaWAN for the Field, Cellular for the Cloud
June 3, 2026 · 6 min read · Case Studies
250 soil sensors on a 500-hectare farm. Cellular on every sensor: 245 EUR/year. LoRaWAN sensors with 3 cellular gateways: 3.70 EUR/year. The architecture is LoRaWAN to the sensor, cellular to the cloud.
TL;DR: A 500-hectare farm, 250 sensors. Cellular on every sensor: 245 EUR/year in SIM fees. LoRaWAN sensors with 3 cellular gateways: 3.70 EUR/year. The cost gap is 65x. Architecture: LoRaWAN for the field (2-15 km, multi-year battery, no SIM), cellular for backhaul (NB-IoT, one SIM per gateway). For farms beyond tower range, satellite.
Sensor density per hectare
Soil moisture: 0.5-2 nodes/ha. 500-ha farm: roughly 320 sensors. Daily data: 100-400 KB aggregated. At 0.7344 EUR/GB, data cost is negligible. SIM fee dominates the economics.
When cellular on every sensor wins
Under 20 hectares, under 20 sensors: gateway infrastructure costs more than SIMs. Real-time irrigation control: LoRaWAN duty cycles block sub-second actuation. Then NB-IoT per sensor at 0.1020 EUR/month.
Satellite for off-grid farms
SES + Advannotech (South Africa, March 2026): LoRaWAN sensors, satellite gateway, no cellular. Airtime 1-5 EUR/month for aggregated payloads. Yield improvement dwarfs connectivity cost.
Source: Dataweek / Otto Wireless, "Smart farming with LoRaWAN", April 2026. Available at https://www.dataweek.co.za/27068r