By ANN HINCH

Associate Editor

DANVILLE, Ind. — For farmers who don’t have high-speed internet service in their homes or rural businesses, there’s always the smart phone or perhaps even a wireless router installed in the cab of newer tractors and combines that lets them get online quickly.

But probably is not “always.” Or “quickly.”

Cell tower buildout and service in rural America notoriously leaves gaps in coverage. As Sharon Strover, director of the University of Texas’ Telecommunications and Information Policy Institute, wrote in an analysis earlier this year, “just because a carrier has a cell tower along an interstate highway does not mean the rest of the surrounding county also has good coverage.”

Another problem for farmers, said Adam Garretson – GO SMART manager for The Equity in Effingham, Ill. – is there’s a data “bottleneck” in a lot of rural network infrastructure. The technology that equipment manufacturers are selling for precision ag use outstrips the capability of many a farm’s internet service provider (ISP) to deliver the resulting data in timely fashion for the farmer’s benefit in-field.

And that’s where there even is internet connectivity on a farm, noted Johnny Park, CEO of Wabash Heartland Innovation Network and an Indiana ag-tech entrepreneur. He and Garretson were part of a panel about ag and broadband at the inaugural state-sponsored Broadband Summit in Danville on Oct. 18.

“Sketchy service” is what Indiana Farm Bureau Director of State Government Relations Justin Schneider often hears from his membership – not just about home internet access, but also hit-and-miss cell tower service for the phones.

He cited the example of one farmer with 2,500 acres who has to wait 72 hours for data to finish uploading from his precision ag sensors to even be analyzed. In fact, it’s faster to copy the data from computer to a USB flash drive, then drive it to a city where it can be sent to the experts via broadband there.

After all, one goal of precision ag is to save a grower time and money in real time by delivering information on where to seed or spray – or rather, where not to twice. “If we had a better internet highway, there’s much more … it’d help a lot with the efficiency” of the machines doing the work, explained Sal Sama, director of sales and marketing for Premier Ag of Seymour, Ind.

Garretson said Equity serves more than 1 million grower acres in Illinois and often “data collection” is someone driving to a farm to download its sensors’ data for analysis. In fact, there’s so much data, the co-op is looking to hire five new tech specialists to make sense of what’s rolling in.

Broadband would make the process much faster, he said, adding he was attending the summit to learn from Indiana’s efforts, in hopes of taking ideas back to his state.

At least now there’s more awareness of the demand for rural broadband. “We’ve spent so much time the past few years trying to get recognition there is a need,” Schneider said, adding the current challenge is figuring out how to supply it.

As farms are in sparsely-populated areas, there’s less inducement for an ISP to run fiber optic lines for broadband than in less rural areas, which has more potential customers per mile to earn back its investment. In rural areas, certain businesses will pay to have broadband run to them because it’s necessary, at which point residents within a certain distance may be able to pay to “hook in;” Schneider said some Indiana ag businesses have done that.

Park said he thought it important to get more rural areas connected than to worry immediately if the bandwidth, or rate of data transfer, is the fastest possible. He compared it to an economy of scale, in that the larger something grows, the better chance there is to decrease costs for it later on, compared to the cost to start it – or, the bandwidth can be increased later.

Sama disagreed on waiting on bandwidth. He said once service is put in place to an area, more people may start using it and require more bandwidth faster than thought, likening it to a country road finally being paved.

“You don’t know who all is going to come drive on that once it’s paved and widened,” he quipped.

Park is concerned now with basic connectivity among farms, which can be later upgraded. He explained there are thousands of data collection and computing devices that share information online – also known as the Internet of Things, or IoT. As the population and tech grow over time, he can envision a future with trillions of interconnected IoT devices worldwide – and farms need to have the physical infrastructure to play in that arena.

Schneider pointed out growers aren’t the only ones who make use of precision ag tools. There are plenty of livestock producers who use cameras and sensors to monitor animals and their environment, such as confined operations, that want to be able to locate near high-speed ISPs. But they also face opposition from non-farm residents in those more-populated areas who don’t want the odor.

A big point of rural connectivity, said Indiana Agriculture Director Bruce Kettler, is aimed at keeping people in rural communities and on farms by improving quality of life and access to some of the same benefits as city-dwellers.

He cited an article in this month’s Harvard Political Review, “Keeping Rural America Alive,” that addresses “rural flight” and its economic losses, in part: “Many rural areas experience a weakened tax base due to rural flight. As a result, these communities cannot fund schools, infrastructure, health care and other necessities.”

Schneider recalled his own youth, seeing small businesses in rural areas that have since closed. “This flight that we talk about is going to completely decimate these communities” if something isn’t done to stem the tide, he said – including boosting quality of life through connectivity.