Connected Farms: Building the Backbone of Smart Agriculture

When you speak with Melissa Andrews, Co-Founder and Category Lead of Connected Farms, you quickly realise you’re talking to someone who doesn’t just see technology as wires and signals. She sees it as connection in the truest sense of the word.From regional New South Wales to remote corners of New Zealand, Canada, the UK and the US, Connected Farms has one clear mission: to make digital connectivity as fundamental to agriculture as diesel or water. 

“Our end goal,” Melissa says, “is that farmers don’t even think about connectivity anymore. It should just be there, like turning on a tap or starting a tractor.” That simple vision has grown into one of Australia’s most forward-thinking AgTech companies, bridging the gap between telecommunications and farming operations.

How it all began

Melissa and her husband Tom didn’t set out to become revolutionaries in rural communications. Both came from the telco world, where their previous business built radio towers for emergency services and police across regional Australia. "We were always working out on farms,” Melissa recalls. “Farmers would ask if they could use the tower signal because they had no coverage on their property. At the time, this wasn’t our offering, but it planted the seed for what came next.” That seed became Connected Farms, a company born from the simple observation that farmers deserved the same access to communication, data and digital tools as any urban business.“Farmers are business owners,” Melissa says. “They’re making real-time decisions about crops, markets and logistics and they need reliable internet to do it.”

Technology built from the paddock up

Unlike many tech startups that stay in the lab until launch, Connected Farms tests everything in the field in partnership with farmers who trial it on their land.“We’re not interested in building tech that just looks good on paper,” Melissa says. “We want it to survive dust, weather, distance and all the realities of farm life.” Their solutions range from simple plug-and-play Wi-Fi kits for small properties to bespoke private 4G networks for large agricultural enterprises, connectiviyty solutions for vehicles and ag machines. One almond grower, for example, uses Connected Farms’ network to run a fleet of autonomous sprayer robots that weave beneath dense canopies, guided by real-time data. And then there’s CommsXtend, a small, powerful device that turns vehicles into mobile Wi-Fi zones. “I use it in my own car,” Melissa laughs. “I can hold calls, join meetings, or even stream video on roads where I’d usually lose signal. It’s transformative, and not just for productivity. For many people, it means safety, connection and time back with their families.”She recalls one of her favourite customer stories: a father who, during harvest season, used Connected Farms’ connectivity to read bedtime stories to his child over video call from the header. “It’s those small, human moments that remind you what we’re really building,” she says.

The Connected Mindset

Behind every product is a philosophy that mirrors Melissa’s own approach to leadership: stay curious, experiment, iterate. Her team, spread across Australia, New Zealand, the UK and North America works remotely but collaboratively, often using AI to co-create internal documents and frameworks and validate our thinking. Melissa affectionately calls her AI assistant Fergie after the trusty Massey Ferguson tractor. “We brainstorm with Fergie all the time,” she says. “It’s like having a digital colleague who never gets tired. It helps us think differently and unlock ideas we might not get to on our own.” For her, AI isn’t replacing human insight, it’s augmenting it. “It’s changed the way we think and create,” she says. “And that’s what innovation should do, it should open up new thinking and new pathways in your brain.”

Security, scale and the next horizon

As farms grow increasingly connected, from soil sensors to autonomous machines, data security has become a central part of Connected Farms’ mission. “We think about connectivity not just in terms of access, but trust,” Melissa explains. “Farm data is incredibly valuable. Protecting it, making sure networks are secure and resilient, is essential to how we design our systems.”Their work now spans from supporting smallholders to helping corporates integrate vast operations across multiple properties into a single secure network view. As technology continues to evolve, Connected Farms continues to move with it, adapting, expanding and always keeping the farmer’s reality at the centre. Their recently announced partnership with Amazon Leo will further support secure connectivity on farms regardless of location. “Connectivity shouldn’t be a luxury,” Melissa says. “It should be an enabler for safety, efficiency and wellbeing for the greater Ag sector.”

Looking forward

Last week, Melissa and Tom are took Connected Farms global, joining the Australian cohort at Agritechnica in Germany, the world’s largest agricultural technology showcase. It’s both a milestone and a reminder of how far they’ve come from those early days of building towers in regional paddocks. As she prepares to pack her Connected Farms puffer jacket and head into the European winter, Melissa is as grounded as ever. “We started this business to solve real problems,” she says. “Everything else - the tech, the AI, the global opportunities - it all comes back to that.”

---

And perhaps that’s the secret to Connected Farms’ success: in a world of fast-moving innovation, they’ve stayed rooted in the land, connecting people first and technology second.

If you would like to hear more from Melissa join us for our next TEKWOMEN Virtual Lunch & Learn event, Building for the Future: Founders, Farmers and the AgTech Frontier, on Thursday 27 November from 12.30 to 1.30pm AEST. Together with Melissa Andrews of Connected Farms, we’ll unpack what it takes to build and back technology that truly works for agriculture, from the farmer-founder’s reality to the tech startup’s sprint and the advisor’s bird’s-eye view.

You can register your spot > > here < <