Choices, the magazine of food, farm and resource issues recently ran an article on precision agriculture. It’s deep and detailed and comes at a time when I’m looking at maps of broadband coverage in very rural areas on a county-wide level. Often the maps and the numbers don’t seem in sync and the big reason is because the numbers tally households served and the maps show landmass served. Turns out population density is pretty low in some rural counties – and therein lies the rub. The population density is too low and homes too far apart to create an easy business case for building out fiber.

The argument from some city folks is – they choose to live remotely, expensive or nonexistent broadband is the price. Except sometimes these areas include farms and broadband is increasingly a tool in farming – moving the big farms to urban areas isn’t possible. Farming with antiquated technologies is inefficient. This Choices article outlines some of the new tools and needs in agriculture.

A quick look at how the need for broadband has increased…

Farm businesses have made increasingly more frequent use of internet services. Over the last decade, farmers went from having to deliberately acquire internet connectivity to essentially every farmer with a cellular phone having internet connectivity. Early on, farmers utilized the internet to participate in discussion forums and shop for equipment parts, while today a farmer’s use of the internet is ubiquitous. Nearly every farmer with a smart phone uses it to check weather conditions and commodity prices in near-real-time. Over the last three years, telematics have become the quintessential example of how farmers make use of the internet for precision agriculture; allowing farmers to remotely monitor their equipment and the farm workers operating the equipment, upload variable rate prescriptions to applicators, and gather real-time equipment diagnostics and site-specific sensor data.

Precision agriculture technology has been targeted to broad acre crops such as corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, and rice rather than higher value horticultural crops; and has typically been adopted by young farmers who are college educated with a relatively higher endowment of wealth (Mooney et al., 2010; and Schimmelpfennig and Ebel, 2011). The expectation is that every new combine harvester comes with a yield monitor and most will also have a global positioning system (GPS). However, this gives no indication of the proportion that is actually utilized for anything more than in-cab entertainment for the combine operator. It is suspected that most U.S. grain farmers have a yield monitor, and we know that half of all planted corn and soybean acres were harvested with a combine equipped with a yield monitor nearly a decade ago (Schimmelpfennig and Ebel, 2011).

A more recent survey by Holland, Erickson, and Widmar (2013) indicated that telematics adoption for field-to-home office communications was one of the largest changes between the 2011 and 2013 survey of agricultural service dealerships. In 2011, only 7% of agricultural service dealers such as retailers and input suppliers offered telematics as a service compared to 15% in 2013. Holland, Erickson, and Widmar (2013) also reported that two-thirds of service providers stated telematics is perceived to be an emerging technology. Telematics not only requires farm internet connectivity with adequate bandwidth, but in order to be fully utilized that connectivity is sometimes required in non-residential areas. Without instantaneous internet connectivity, the transfer of precision agriculture data is still possible—though with additional caveats.

And a glimpse at what happens when broadband isn’t available (spoiler alert – think sneakernet)…

To better understand the use of information technology in agriculture, it is useful to consider the rapid evolution of one technology, that is, yield monitoring. Yield monitor data were originally transferred by physically removing the memory card, typically flash media such as SD RAM, from the harvester yield monitor and taken to a card reader usually connected to a desktop or laptop computer. The user instructed the computer to copy the files from the memory card to another storage media by performing a series of mouse clicks.

Given current technology, even in the absence of internet connectivity sufficient for data uploads from the field in real-time, it is possible for machine data to be wirelessly transferred to another device using personal area networks (PAN) or Bluetooth. When that device comes within internet connectivity, the data are uploaded to “the cloud.” More common, however, is the current practice of physically moving memory cards or at least performing a series of mouse clicks in order to transfer data between farm equipment and the computer or cloud. One current success story of data connectivity and precision agriculture is from the Climate Corporation which hit the 50-million-acre milestone with the freemium version of its Climate Basic online tool.

A glimpse at why that isn’t sustainable…

The future of the technology requires a passive process for the farm workers operating the equipment such that data will be uploaded to the cloud in real-time while the equipment remains operating in the field. This passive transfer of data will create additional efficiencies for the farming operation, decrease downtime needed to manually transfer, and minimize the human error associated with manual transfer. Thus, high-speed wireless broadband in non-residential areas is required and will be similar to cellular connectivity today.

Future precision agriculture technology requirements include the closing of the gap between upload and download speeds or, at the very least, increasing upload speeds. Pushing prescription data to application equipment—sprayer, planter, fertilizer applicator—requires considerably less bandwidth than uploading machine diagnostics to the cloud. In order for precision agriculture to become standard practice by a critical mass of farmers, data transfer must become completely automated and passive such that no human interaction is required.

The article includes some great maps and charts. Here’s an example…

And finally a quick framing for policymakers on why it’s important to look at households served balanced with access and use in areas with low population density…

As the technologies and data requirements associated with precision agriculture continue to grow, it will be vital to understand the demands being placed on the local broadband network. Policymakers should be aware of the current broadband requirements for precision agriculture techniques while also keeping an eye towards what future applications may need. It seems strange to suggest that future broadband policies might emphasize providing infrastructure for less populous locations when there are still a significant number of Americans who do not have broadband available to them. Economically, however, the optimal allocation of those resources will depend on the objectives of the policy. Specifically, if the policy is focused on providing broadband access to as many unserved rural residents as possible, the extremely low population locations are unlikely to be served. If the policy is, instead, focused on optimizing the overall value added to the economy by potential use of the technology, then subsidized access in low-population yet high-production locations may be a reality.