LoRaWAN for Farms: Connecting Silos Without Cables
LoRaWAN sends small sensor readings kilometres on a battery. Here's how it works on a farm, what it's good at, and how it gets data to your phone.
SiloSense IQ ·
Silos are often a long way from the farm office, from power and from Wi-Fi. Running cable to every one is expensive and rarely practical. That’s why most modern silo monitoring uses LoRaWAN — a wireless network designed for exactly this job.
What LoRaWAN is
LoRaWAN is a low-power, long-range wireless network for sensors. It’s built around three ideas:
- Small messages. A sensor sends a few bytes — a temperature, a humidity, a CO₂ reading — not video or web pages.
- Long range. In open country, a single gateway can often reach sensors several kilometres away. Range depends on terrain, height and obstructions like sheds and trees.
- Very low power. Sensors sleep most of the time and wake briefly to send, so they can run for long periods on a battery — or indefinitely with a small solar panel.
In Australia, LoRaWAN uses the AU915 band, a licence-free frequency band for this kind of device.
How the data gets to you
A LoRaWAN system on a farm has four parts:
- Sensors on and in the silos.
- A gateway — a radio receiver mounted somewhere high on site — that hears every sensor in range.
- A backhaul connection from the gateway to the internet: cellular, Ethernet, Wi-Fi or Starlink.
- A cloud platform that decodes the readings, stores them and shows them on a dashboard and in alerts.
One gateway can serve every silo on a typical site.
What it’s good at
- Sensor readings at regular intervals.
- Remote, spread-out sites without power or network at each silo.
- Long-term installs where you don’t want to keep changing batteries.
What it isn’t for
LoRaWAN isn’t designed for continuous, high-speed data or for sending large files. It’s also not instant in the way a phone call is: readings arrive on a schedule. For silo monitoring, that’s ideal — grain changes over hours and days, not seconds.
Things to check for your site
- Gateway position. Height is everything. Mounting the gateway high, with a clear view of the silos, makes the biggest difference to reliability.
- Backhaul. Pick the most reliable internet connection available at the gateway. Where there’s no mobile coverage, Starlink works well.
- Metal. Silos are steel. Antennas and sensors need to be placed so the silo doesn’t block the signal.
How SiloSense helps
SiloSense IQ uses solar-powered LoRaWAN nodes on each silo, with temperature and humidity cables down through the grain and a headspace CO₂ sensor. A gateway on site sends readings to the cloud over cellular, Ethernet or Starlink, and you see them on the dashboard from anywhere — with alerts when something changes.
Request a demo and we’ll look at the best gateway position for your site.