Mobile coverage on farms has slipped badly since the 3G network was switched off in March, with half of farms now covered on less than half their property and roughly two in three farmers unable to rely on reaching 111 from most of their land, a Federated Farmers survey has found.

The Rural Connectivity Survey, carried out in late August and early September and reported by RNZ's Local Democracy Reporting service on 28 October, drew responses from close to 650 farmers. It follows a 2025 survey, run while 3G was still live, that found 38 per cent of farms already had coverage problems.

Federated Farmers telecommunications spokesperson Mark Hooper said last year's results were already patchy and this year's picture was bleaker. A third of farmers said there was a spot on their farm that worked on 3G but no longer does, and for most the dead zones were not confined to one corner of the property.

One Southland respondent told the survey that the main yard by the road once had perfect reception, but now "you need to stand on one leg and hold your tongue a certain way" to have any chance of making a call.

Eight per cent of farmers said emergency services could not be reached from anywhere on the property, and more than 40 said there was no reliable spot at all. One farmer reported failing a WorkSafe audit because coverage gaps meant staff working alone could not be checked on every two hours.

The cost has not only been in safety. One in seven farms had to replace equipment that ran on 3G, including irrigation and pivot controllers and cow collars, much of it still working when it was retired. Two in three farmers paid for workarounds such as satellite broadband, but only 15 per cent regard satellite-to-mobile services as a proper substitute for a cell tower.

Reporting faults has achieved little, the survey suggests. Of 126 farms that raised coverage or reliability problems with their provider, two had them fixed. Hooper said some providers were close to denying there was an issue.

Roads are affected too. Four in five farmers know a stretch of their regular route where calls drop out, and eight times as many say highway coverage has got worse over the past year as say it has improved.

Hooper said assurances from telcos that 4G and 5G would cover the areas 3G once reached had "proved hollow", and that different frequencies travelling differently across hill country appeared to have left farming families with a lower standard of service.

Federated Farmers wants telcos to restore service to at least pre-shutdown levels and is holding what it calls urgent meetings with the companies to find out what fine-tuning of existing towers, or planned investment, could help. Hooper acknowledged the argument against building new towers when satellite calling is on the way, but said farmers needed fixes now.

Telecommunications Forum chief executive Paul Brislen told TVNZ's Breakfast earlier in October that nobody should struggle to reach 111 and urged farmers with problems to report them to their telco.

The survey lands as Southland farmers head into a busy season on remote blocks, a year after the October 2025 storm knocked out power and communications across the region for days.