On-Site Gateway

Rural farms don’t have reliable internet — AnyFarm is designed for this reality

The fibre drops. Eskom cuts the power. The cell tower goes quiet for an afternoon. Whatever your connection — fibre, satellite, GSM, a WISP or a local ISP — none of it should stop irrigation from running on schedule, or sensor data from being recorded, or your spray QC from finishing.

The on-site gateway is a small server that sits on your farm network. It caches everything the cloud knows — your schedules, your zone configs, your device settings — and keeps the operation running when the internet goes down.

How it works

• The gateway lives on your farm LAN
• Your IoT controllers connect to the gateway, not directly to the internet
• The gateway has a local copy of everything that matters: schedules, pump configs, valve channels, cultivar Kc values for irrigation decisions
• When the internet drops, everything keeps running. Irrigation schedules execute. Sensors report. Events are logged.
• When connectivity returns, all queued data syncs automatically to the cloud — nothing is lost

Your irrigation controllers are fully autonomous

Even the gateway is a fallback layer. The actual irrigation controllers (IC-100) are designed to run on their own:

• Schedules are stored in flash memory on the controller itself
• If the gateway goes down, controllers keep running the last schedules they were given
• Power-loss recovery: if power comes back within 5 minutes, the controller picks up the irrigation run it was on, automatically

Why it matters

• Load shedding doesn’t stop your irrigation. UPS-backed gateway, flash-stored schedules, automatic power-loss recovery.
• Connectivity hiccups don’t lose data. Sensor readings and events queue locally and sync the moment a link is back.
• Your farm operates reliably — fibre, satellite, GSM, WISP or local ISP; grid or generator.

What the gateway does, in plain terms

• Hosts the field radio network — serves the 868 MHz Sub-GHz wireless network and LoRa, linking field sensors, valve nodes and trackers back to the gateway over long range
• Runs an MQTT broker — the on-farm message bus IoT devices publish to and subscribe from, so everything talks in real time, locally
• Talks to controllers in real time — accepts their data, sends them commands, manages configuration over the LAN
• Queues data for the cloud — sensor readings, irrigation events, alerts, all stored locally until they can be delivered
• Holds a working copy of the farm’s data — so the platform’s rules can run on-site, without needing to phone the cloud
• Syncs efficiently — only changed config comes down, only undelivered events go up

Tech spec, briefly

Suitable for any small box on the farm that can run Docker reliably and reach the field network on the LAN.