21ST CENTURY PROBLEMS: Farmers ‘crippled’ by satellite failure as GPS-guided tractors grind to a halt.

Tractors have ground to a halt in paddocks across Australia and New Zealand because of a signal failure in the satellite farmers use to guide their GPS-enabled machinery, stopping them from planting their winter crop.

The satellite failure on Monday was a bolt from the blue for farmers in NSW and Victoria, who were busy taking advantage of optimal planting conditions for crops including wheat, canola, oats, barley and legumes.

“You couldn’t have picked a worse time for it,” said Justin Everitt, a grain grower in the Riverina who heads NSW Farmers’ grains committee.

“Over the past few years, all these challenges have been thrown at us, but this is just one we never thought would come up.”

Tractors that pull seed-planting machinery, as well as the massive combine harvesters that reap Australia’s vast grain crops, are high-tech beasts that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

They are enabled with GPS tracking and can be guided to an accuracy within two centimetres, enabling seed-planting equipment to sow crops with precision to drive up efficiency, prevent wastage and boost environmental sustainability.

All that went out the window when the Inmarsat-41 satellite signal failed.

Precision farming with this degree of accuracy is great, but a single point of tech failure is a terrible idea.

Plus: “If the Medibank and Optus data breaches didn’t make the agriculture industry sit up and take notice, the implementation of kill switches on stolen Ukrainian tractors in 2022 should have been a three-alarm wake-up call.”