In short: Growing Sussex deployed more than 550 connected devices across commercial farms and land-based colleges, covering 11 use cases from soil monitoring to autonomous machinery. Four private 5G networks built by Boldyn Networks provided the backbone. The project proved precision agriculture works at scale in a horticultural sector worth over one billion pounds in gross value added.
Key Takeaways
- 550+ devices across 11 use cases — not a single-sensor pilot but a comprehensive deployment spanning soil, crops, livestock, drones, and autonomous machinery
- Four private 5G networks — Boldyn Networks deployed dedicated networks at multiple sites, providing coverage and reliability that farm-scale IoT demands
- Sussex horticulture alone exceeds one billion pounds GVA — the economic case for precision agriculture in the UK's most productive growing regions is substantial
In a nutshell
The Scale of What Was Deployed
Agricultural technology trials in the UK have historically been small — a handful of sensors on one field, a drone flight over one vineyard. Growing Sussex, part of the DSIT-funded 5G Innovation Regions programme, answered the real question: does this work at the scale of a commercial operation, across multiple use cases, over a full growing season?
More than 550 devices deployed across multiple farms and colleges, covering 11 use cases: soil monitoring (moisture, temperature, pH, nutrients), crop health cameras, pest detection, vineyard microclimate sensors, livestock wearables, autonomous machinery, and drone operations. Each use case individually generates modest data. Collectively, they create a data environment no existing farm connectivity can reliably support. TechUK's assessment of the project provides additional detail on how private 5G addresses agricultural resilience specifically.
Why Farms Need Private 5G
Most UK agricultural land has poor or no mobile coverage, and fixed broadband terminates at the farmhouse rather than in the fields. WiFi does not work at field scale — 100 metres of outdoor range versus 50-hectare arable fields. LPWAN technologies like LoRaWAN cover the distance but trade range for bandwidth, which makes them fundamentally unsuitable for video or autonomous machinery control.
Private 5G fills the gap: bandwidth for video, latency for machine control, and density for hundreds of IoT sensors simultaneously. The four networks Boldyn Networks deployed provided coverage where public networks simply do not reach. The trade-off, which we should acknowledge, is cost: deploying private 5G infrastructure across agricultural land is expensive relative to farm margins, and the economics only work at present for high-value horticulture or operations large enough to amortise the network cost across sufficient acreage. For a small livestock farm in mid-Wales, the business case is not yet there.
The Economics
Sussex horticulture contributes over one billion pounds in GVA to the UK economy. Precision agriculture is not a luxury for this sector but an economic necessity. Water costs are rising, fertiliser prices remain volatile, and labour availability has tightened since 2020. Supermarket supply contracts demand consistent quality and traceability that manual observation cannot reliably deliver.
Data from 550+ connected devices enables irrigation triggered by measured soil moisture rather than calendar schedules, fertiliser applied at variable rates based on actual nutrient maps, and pest treatment targeted to affected areas rather than applied blanket-wide. Each change reduces input costs, improves yield consistency, and generates the traceability data supply chain partners require. Importantly, these are not theoretical benefits — the Growing Sussex deployment ran across real commercial operations over a full growing season, and the results reflect what happens when you give farmers actual data rather than asking them to guess.
From Sussex to the Rest of UK Agriculture
Growing Sussex proved the technology stack works at commercial scale: 550 devices, 11 use cases, private 5G, real farms, real agricultural workflows. The challenges it addressed — poor rural connectivity, the need for precision data, input cost pressure — are universal across UK agriculture and directly transferable to arable farms in East Anglia, livestock operations in Wales, and horticultural businesses nationwide.
The question is therefore no longer whether 5G-connected agriculture works — it does. The question is how quickly the cost of private 5G deployment falls to a point where it is viable for the wider farming sector, not just the highest-value operations. We believe the trajectory is encouraging, but in the real world, agricultural margins are thin, and connectivity investment competes with every other call on a farmer's capital. The wider context matters: if the UK is serious about food security and agricultural productivity, the infrastructure gap in rural connectivity needs to be treated as a national priority, not left to individual farm businesses to solve on their own.