UnaBiz and Orange helped French company Weenat boost agricultural efficiency for more than 30,000 farmers with IoT sensors connected on the Sigfox 0G network and LoRaWan.

Weenat needed scalable, energy-efficient, reliable and cost-effective network connectivity, even in areas without cellular service, to enable the commercial viability of its precision agriculture technologies for farmers.

Partnering with UnaBiz and Orange, Weenat has rapidly deployed 30,000 IoT-enabled agro-weather sensors using unlicensed LPWAN technologies – 15,000 on the Sigfox network and 15,000 on LoRaWan – to deliver precision agriculture services to a growing number of farmers worldwide.

Every day, farmers who manage crops and livestock think about the weather. While sunny skies and gentle rains nurture bumper crops, adverse weather, such as drying winds, drought, frost, humidity or too much rain, can destroy crop yields within hours.

Traditional weather forecasts usually fail to capture the localised climate variations that farmers need and rarely share meaningful insights into hyper-local agricultural information, such as soil temperature, sunlight angles and humidity impact on leaf wetness. Agro-weather sensors help bridge this gap by giving farmers precise, local environmental and crop condition data.

However, agro-weather sensors depend on reliable network connectivity, and many agricultural areas, especially remote areas or white zones, lack traditional network coverage.

Weenat provides IoT agro-weather sensors. The company empowers farmers with precise, real-time data on soil conditions, crop health and environmental factors. Such insights let farmers make proactive, data-driven decisions.

Weenat designed hybrid IoT sensors to capture data that switch smoothly between LPWANs, according to the best network availability across a farmer’s property. To expand this to more farmers internationally, Weenat needed long-range, energy-efficient, cost-effective, scalable network connectivity that was available even in areas without traditional coverage.

Weenat partnered with UnaBiz and Orange to connect its agro-weather IoT sensors to two complementary LPWANs: the Sigfox 0G network and LoraWan enabled by Orange Business. Both networks provide low-power, long-range, cost-effective communications for IoT, which typically transmit small bytes of data from remote monitoring sensors at periodic intervals.

The Sigfox 0G network is available in 70 countries, covering more than one billion people. This widespread coverage enables Weenat to deploy IoT services even in rural or hard-to-reach areas where traditional cellular networks fall short.

The engineers at Weenat designed every sensor for harsh agricultural environments and built them to withstand harsh weather conditions, impact shock, and tampering from curious animals or humans.

Installation is simple and considers mobility, allowing farmers to move sensors around a property to measure different conditions. Farmers can place sensors directly in the soil or attach them to existing structures such as fences. Although every farm differs, Weenat recommends one weather station every seven kilometres and around six tensiometers per irrigation sector.

Once installed, connecting sensors to the LPWAN takes minutes: farmers activate this by scanning the barcode on the sensor. Then, every 15 minutes, each connected device shares data over the locally available LPWAN with a central database that populates the Weenat app with hyper-local farm insights.

Farmers pay an annual licence fee to access the app, where two or three taps on a phone screen give them on-demand, real-time data on field moisture, temperature, humidity, wind speed, strength and direction, photosynthetically active radiation levels, and more.

Farmers can also configure parameters in the app to alert them to certain conditions, such as extreme temperatures or wind speeds, and schedule reminders to take action in specific time windows, such as modifying irrigation.

Today, this system analyses more than one billion IoT data points daily. Over 30,000 farmers across 15 countries rely on it to inform daily decision-making.

“Thanks to the reliable, low-cost public LPWAN coverage provided by UnaBiz France and Orange Business, we can confidently deploy our sensors in remote farming areas and provide farmers with meaningful, real-time data to improve day-to-day decision-making, without worrying about white zones, complicated infrastructure and unsustainable costs,” said Louis Cognet, deputy general manager at Weenat (weenat.com).

Arnaud Tayac, managing director for UnaBiz in France (www.unabiz.fr), added: “In agricultural industries, reliable, cost-effective connectivity is crucial for real-time data collection from connected sensors. The proven network availability of converging two robust LPWANs, even in remote areas and across difficult terrain, has proven transformative for Weenat. By enabling precision agriculture, low-power, long-range, low-cost networks help farmers remove the guesswork from daily operations and improve the use of precious resources to create sustainable, profitable farming that benefits consumers globally.”

And Pierre-François Valton, commercial director at Orange Business (www.orange-business.com), said: “Orange Business plays a key role in advancing connected agriculture in France through its partnership with Weenat. By providing LoRaWan connectivity, Orange Business ensures reliable data transmission for smart sensors, enabling efficient crop monitoring. With coverage spanning over 95% of the French population and more than 30,000 municipalities, its LoRaWan forms a core component of Orange Business’s IoT strategy.”