While urban America has nearly universal access to wired broadband, the rate in rural America is 78 percent, according to industry data. USDA’s 2012 Census of Agriculture says 70 percent of farms have Internet access but a third of them use dial-up, satellite or mobile connections “that may not be adequate when it comes to accessing and delivering the large quantities of data that are associated with some precision agriculture processes,” write Brian Whitace, Tyler Mark and Terry Griffin in Choices, the journal of agricultural economics. “The availability of broadband for farm offices and land in production has serious implications for the future of agriculture.”
“The future of the technology” in precision agriculture and Big Data is for real-time transfer of data from equipment in the field to a centralized database for analysis, rather than the common practice of removal of memory cards from equipment for data retrieval or downloading data whenever the machine comes within range of Internet service, the article says. “Thus, high-speed wireless broadband in non-residential areas is required and will be similar to cellular connectivity today.”
“The vast majority” of corn- and wheat-producing counties, aside from spotty coverage in Idaho and Montana, “appear to be in counties which have broadband access for over 98 percent of their populations,” says the article.
But, “access to faster upload speeds may be an impending issue,” it says, because high transfer rates are needed for the mass of data gathered while equipment traverses a field. “In particular, counties with significant harvested acres in states such as Texas, Nebraska, Iowa and Kentucky appear to have very limited access to 3 Mbps (megabytes per second) upload speeds with less than 50 percent of the population having such availability in many cases.”
Unlike other parts of farm operations, “broadband adoption is externally constrained,” say Whitacre, Mark and Griffin, because it is provided by a utility off the farm. They also note that precision agriculture is not considered “scale neutral” because of the large investments required in equipment and training, but Big Data “provides farmers of all size classes an opportunity to participate in community-based analytics.”