LoRa Alliance claims leading position in IoT for agriculture

Details: Vaughan O'Grady; Category: Enterprise Ecosystems; 09 July 2026; 189 views

Agribusiness seems to have become a very attractive proposition for IoT equipment and services providers, as a recent announcement from the LoRa Alliance, the organisation defining, evolving and promoting the LoRaWAN standard, indicates.

The LoRa Alliance has this week announced that LoRaWAN, a way of linking sensor devices and applications together, has become the connectivity method of choice for smart agriculture, from single farms to national programmes, claiming that it has a number of strengths that suit smart agriculture better than any other LPWAN technology.

These include long range, low power (sensors and tags run for years on small or solar batteries) and low cost (it uses free, unlicensed spectrum). In addition, for distributed outdoor sites it is more convenient to deploy than cellular, Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. It is also able to access satellite-connected LoRaWAN where terrestrial coverage runs out.

Other strengths include the broadest range of sensors and gateways of any LPWAN technology and the widest global adoption: more than 125 million devices were connected worldwide via LoRaWAN at the end of 2025.

Importantly too, uptake goes well beyond the US and Western Europe, notably to Ghana and Brazil where the Banalytics project, supported by satellite connectivity provider Lacuna Space, uses satellite-connected LoRaWAN sensors to detect Black Sigatoka, the world's most damaging banana disease, before symptoms spread.

Meanwhile in Malaysia, on a durian estate of more than 80 hectares, more than 20 LoRaWAN soil sensors from open-source hardware provider Seeed Studio have been deployed across 6,000 trees, freeing up staff for plant-health work and building the estate's first data benchmark for durian cultivation.

Another example comes from Bulgaria, where a large-scale producer of watermelons and cabbages struggled with under-watering and over-watering across wide fields. IoT solutions provider Loren Networks deployed KIWI agriculture sensors from TELTELIC, a leading supplier of LoRaWAN gateways, devices, applications, and end-to-end IoT solutions, to measure 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.

Other applications cited by the LoRa Alliance include nutrient monitoring, precision irrigation and valve control, weather and microclimate stations, frost and storm alerts, greenhouse or polytunnel climate control, animal-health monitoring, grain silo and cold-store conditions, fuel and tank levels, and fence, gate and equipment security. Uses of LoRaWAN, it suggests, can even extend to beehive and pollination monitoring, and aquaculture water quality.

The potential of IoT in agriculture is clear. What this announcement appears to indicate is that it is also a market worth competing for, which may be good news for the LoRaWAN standard, but could be even better news for agribusiness and sustainability.