(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- When a ceasefire between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah went into effect in late November, 67-year-old Itzhik Cohen was finally able to take in the damage to the fields in Adamit, his kibbutz in a mountainous, windswept area in northern Israel less than a mile from the Lebanese border. The kibbutz’s residents were forced to evacuate because of the Hezbollah rocket barrage that began after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks. While some farmworkers were able to access the fields periodically, it wasn’t enough to keep the peach orchards from shriveling; they’ll need to be uprooted and replaced. The mango crops were consumed by a bacterial infection. A rocket landed in the vineyard, setting off a fire that destroyed years of work. Miles of new greenhouses were overrun with 6-foot-tall weeds. Some neglected groves abutting the border are heavy with ripe avocados, but the farmers missed the export deadline and can only sell them at a loss. Israeli military sappers are still scouring the fields for unexploded ordnance.
Adamit remains mostly abandoned. Cohen says he’s concerned that families with young children will never feel safe enough to come back, threatening the community’s long-term viability. But his short-term focus is the fields. “This will take five years to rehabilitate,” he says, standing in the orchard. By Cohen’s estimate, the financial losses from the peaches alone are probably more than $500,000, and that doesn’t even include the cost of replanting the trees. He’s preparing the kibbutz’s claim for compensation for war damages with the government, but he doesn’t expect to be made whole.
Israel’s Tax Authority says it has received almost 2,000 such requests from farmers seeking compensation for war-related damage. But the rehabilitation of the sector may be impeded by another consequence of the continuing conflict: the Israeli military’s jamming of GPS signals. This began after the Oct. 7 attacks, to protect against GPS-guided missiles, rockets and drones. And while Israel has scaled back those efforts after the ceasefire with Lebanon, signals in much of the country remain unreliable. Continued threats from Yemen and Iraq, as well as unrest in Syria, lower the chances that the disruptions will be eased entirely anytime soon.
Around 70% of Israeli farmers use precision-farming technologies, according to a 2021 survey led by Israel’s Volcani Center and Hebrew University of Jerusalem. That compares with just 27% of American farms, according to a 2023 US Government Accountability Office report. Not all of those technologies are GPS-dependent, but many are, including semiautonomous tractors, crop-mapping systems, drones for targeted pesticide spraying, and systems for remote monitoring and soil sampling, according to Yafit Cohen, who co-authored the survey. “You can’t farm today without knowing your location,” she says. “You just can’t.”
Israel’s agricultural operations are also clustered in particularly vulnerable places. The farming communities along the Gaza border, including those Hamas targeted on Oct.7, produce, among other things, more than 70% of Israel’s tomatoes, according to the Agriculture Ministry. One-third of Israel’s overall produce comes from the northern Galilee region along the Lebanese border, a rural area peppered with orchards, chicken coops and vineyards.
Since the Oct. 7 attacks, war has taken a profound human and economic toll on the Middle East. Farmers have been hit hard. Israel’s agricultural losses from October 2023 to March 2024 were about $280 million, according to a report co-written by the country’s environmental agency, health ministry and Leket, a nonprofit food bank. A World Bank report from November estimated Lebanon’s agricultural losses at $1.1 billion for a period covering about a year following the Oct. 7 attacks. According to the United Nations, more than two-thirds of cropland in Gaza has also been damaged, which “compounds the imminent risk of famine,” says Beth Bechdol, deputy director general of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization.
The Israeli government does not collect data on the economic impact of the military’s GPS jamming, and the Agriculture Ministry said in a statement that it “hasn’t prevented continuous farm work.” But a 2020 memo from the ministry estimated that far more sporadic GPS disruptions in neighboring Syria led to annual losses of $28 million for Israeli farmers.
Israeli cities have also been affected by GPS jamming, which disrupted smartphone mapping apps and delivery services. These incidents can be added to a growing roster of economic disruptions caused by GPS problems in recent years, due to warfare, criminal sabotage or even bad weather. Farmers in Finland, airlines operating in Eastern Europe and truckers in Russia have all reported disruptions from the war in Ukraine. In May a solar storm prompted a rare warning from tractor maker Deere & Co. to US farmers to temporarily hold off on agricultural work using some GPS-guided equipment.
“People around the world treat GPS like a God-given right,” says Omer Sharar, chief executive officer of infiniDome, an Israeli startup supplying the Israeli and US armies with anti-jamming technology. “Everybody has to prepare for the day that it’s not going to be there.”
At Mevo Hama, a kibbutz in the southern Golan Heights about 97 kilometers (60 miles) from the Lebanese border, the Israeli military’s interference led to a sudden need for someone who knew how to operate farm machinery without GPS. Rami Laner, a 74-year-old member of the community who hadn’t plowed a field in more than three decades, came out of retirement to tend the kibbutz’s wheat, corn and herbs. “We’ve gone back to methods of 50 years ago or more,” he says, adding that the younger farmers still aren’t very good at them. “Part of the staff grew up with GPS and new technologies and don’t know how to work without it. A lot of the work is being done in very imprecise ways, which has serious economic implications.” Laner also says GPS jamming led one of Mevo Hama’s expensive crop-spraying drones to crash in November 2023.
Israeli farmers have other things to worry about, too. At the start of the war, foreign workers fled and Israel’s government barred most Palestinians from entering the country, creating what the government described as the most dire agricultural worker shortage since Israel’s creation in 1948. Farmers in areas most affected by the war required the military’s permission to access their fields and faced significant danger when doing so. The Iron Dome missile defense system is only activated when the projectiles are heading to populated areas, so agricultural areas were threatened by rockets, mortars, drones and antitank fire with little or no warning.
Like Mevo Hama, Kfar Masaryk, near Haifa, was largely out of the line of direct fire until September, when rockets punched holes in its fields. The bombardments destroyed a water tank, scorched cotton fields and in November killed a teenager working at the kibbutz. Its farmers haven’t had a stable GPS signal in more than a year, forcing them to revert to slower, messier and ultimately less efficient techniques. On a tour of the kibbutz last summer, farmer Yotam Mizrachi pointed to a freshly plowed tomato field, its rows identifiably crooked.
Even though the signals have been partially restored since the ceasefire, the effect will be felt throughout 2025, says Mizrachi. The kibbutz’s farmers have marked the seedbeds and planted next year’s crops without access to navigational signals. “The moment you work without GPS on the first field, for the rest of the season you can’t work with GPS,” explains Nevo Cohen, another farmer at Kfar Masaryk.
Miri Atias of the Association of Field Crop Farmers (Falcha) in Israel has been interviewing startups that offer products that claim to offset GPS jamming but says none of the available solutions match the needs of farmers. They require precision of 2 centimeters to 10 centimeters, while the accuracy offered by startups is within a meter.
The war has spurred the companies to fine-tune their technologies. Dror Meiri of the California-based startup OneNav has been conducting tests in GPS-denied Haifa, Israel’s third-largest city, which had no GPS for more than a year and where signals can still be patchy. Since the start of the war he’s been driving around, field-testing a prototype chip he says can bypass military GPS jamming and restore navigational signals on cellphones. “It’s clear that this GPS war is here to stay,” he says.
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