At Cereals 2026, Connected Farms CEO Tom Andrews joined Charlie Coates of Amazon Leo on stage at Diddly Squat Farm, in a panel hosted by our Chief Product Officer, Brian Baumgartner. One idea kept coming up: connectivity on a farm isn't a phone plan anymore. It's an input, like diesel or fertiliser, and the farms that treat it that way are the ones ready for autonomy.
Tom described a corporate farm that spent millions on a robot programme: a dozen very expensive machines. Nobody had checked whether there was coverage across the area the robots would work.
"Sprayers were just stopping and nobody knew where they were," Tom said. "They had to go and find them, simply because the connectivity hadn't been checked."
A good autonomous platform should keep working without a signal. But when something goes wrong, it has to reach an operator. Without coverage, an autonomous fleet turns into a search party.
Mobile networks are built around people, along highways and in towns. Farms get patches of coverage, not a network. "When you come to farms, there is no purpose-built coverage," Tom said.
The cost of that gap is time. Brian has deployed robots on Australian farms where the nearest town is three hours away. Without a signal, one fault means a three-hour drive to find out what's wrong, three hours to get the part and three hours back. "It takes up your whole day, literally."
Charlie explained that Amazon Leo is building a low Earth orbit satellite network to deliver high-speed, low-latency connectivity in places mobile networks don't reach, starting with remote sites and farmhouses and potentially extending to machines.
What machines need from a network is changing. It has moved from low-data telemetry to over-the-air software updates anywhere on the farm and remote video from vehicles, and in future it will support full autonomy. All of that needs reliable, high-throughput connectivity that's always available.
Satellite is one layer. Connected Farms combines it with on-farm cellular to carry coverage across the whole property and onto the machines working it. "It's a balance of satellite technologies and cellular," Tom said. "Mobility is a big part of it."
Tom's main point was about mindset. "There needs to be a step change in the way farmers think about connectivity. It's not like a mobile phone plan. It's an input, the same as diesel, the same as fertiliser."
Like any input, it has a return. Good connectivity is what lets other technology work: cutting chemical use, maximising yield and helping with decisions such as grain selection in the field so you get the most for your crop.
The order matters too. Before deploying robots, Tom recommends a digital roadmap for the farm: where you're going, and what sensors and weather stations you need to understand what's happening. That's even more important in the UK, he noted, where farmers without subsidies are relying on agtech to get the most from every hectare, and agtech needs connectivity.
For Tom, the best result isn't always technical. He recalled a young harvest operator in Australia who shook his hand and told him Connected Farms had changed his life.
At harvest, he left before his young children woke up and got home after they were in bed. Once his machine was connected, he started reading them a bedtime story from the cab every night.
"It's great, all the shiny stuff, making machines work, the cost saving," Tom said. "But there's a real human, personal side to all this as well."
Connectivity also gives time back to the younger people on the farm, who often become the farm's IT department by default. They can fix a setting on a sprayer remotely instead of driving out to it.
Charlie's advice was simple: look at where you lose signal today. Almost every conversation at Cereals came back to gaps in the mobile network, or no network at all.
If you're planning for robots or autonomy, plan connectivity first, before you buy the machine.
Watch the full session (26 min) above, or see all three Cereals 2026 sessions at connectedfarms.co/cereals-2026.
Planning for autonomy? info@connectedfarms.co
Recorded June 2026 at Cereals, Diddly Squat Farm, UK. Details about Amazon Leo reflect that time.