Riverina farmer confidence in satellite GPS technology shaken after British Inmarsat satellite outage throws sowing season schedule

On Sunday April 20, the British satellite Inmarsat I-4 F1 providing satellite correctional signals to a large proportion of Australian farming machinery experienced an outage, throwing farmers' sowing plans into disarray.

While the satellite is now back online, it has raised major questions about the reliability of satellite technology as farmers increasingly rely upon it.

NSW Farmers Wagga branch chair Alan Brown said it is a "serious concern."

"A lot of the machinery these days just can't operate without GPS," Mr Brown said.

"It's going to be a real problem if we don't get it sorted out."

Fortunately, the outage came before farmers hit the peak of the sowing season.

"The very early winter crops are basically all in, and the main sowing season is yet to come, so the timing is fortuitous in that way," Mr Brown said.

He said the design of modern machinery has caused farmers to become "heavily dependent on GPS."

If farmers were forced to abandon the technology, Mr Brown said they would be "back to the old primitive sowing by eye" method.

"Some machines simply don't work without GPS, so they will be parked up with farmers scratching around looking for older machinery they can use," he said.

NSW Farmers grains committee chair Justin Everitt runs a 2500-acre farm at Brocklesby 120km southwest of Wagga and said the outage caused significant impact to operations.

At the time of the outage, Mr Everitt was in the middle of sowing canola with the outage setting operations back 48 hours.

"Without the precise auto-steer [function] we just couldn't [keep sowing. The outage] made it impossible," he said.

"Everything was full steam [ahead] and the outage managed to put us back behind [schedule]."

Mr Everitt said the outage has significantly undermined his confidence in the technology.

"Since then, our accuracy doesn't seem to be as precise and, if it drops out it seems to take a lot longer to come back online," he said.

Mr Everitt said the outage had left farmers not just if but when another outage might take place.

"Confidence has definitely taken a huge hit and we're all just fearful of it happening again."

"I feel like it's more likely it will happen again than not," he said.

He said the financial cost was also a blow.

"I had employees for those two days and had to find other jobs for them to do," he said.

"That wasn't hard, but it's an added cost when they were there for a specific role and we wanted to get that completed."

A spokesperson for British satellite telecommunications company Inmarsat said it "regrets the outage" and issued an apology to all affected users.

The company also flagged upgrades to the system in the near future.

"Many of the services currently delivered by I-4 F1 will be moved to Inmarsat's new, high-performance I-6 F1 satellite in the coming months as Inmarsat's investment in new and additional satellites continues," the spokesperson said.