Unlocking Broadband in the Heartland: A Harvest of American Opportunity

How innovation, collaboration and philanthropy help bridge the digital divide

In Bowling Green, Missouri, a soy farmer struggles with the bandwidth she needs to support her farm’s new precision agriculture technology—stunting crop yields and the ability to innovate.

In South Bloomington, Illinois, owners of a family flower and produce farm are unable to launch their business website due to poor load times and slow internet speeds—causing frustrations and income disruptions.

Two-and-a-half hours southwest, an Elsah village resident searches for broadband and cell service while trying to contact the local fire department to alert them of a house fire.

These are true stories from America’s heartland—a sprawling roughly 1 million square miles of land stretching across 20 inland states.

Generating more than $152 billion annually in agricultural output, the heartland serves, not just as an engine powering U.S. job growth, but as an international economic force, ranking fourth in scale globally. And yet, across the region, reliable, high-speed internet remains out of reach for many. In fact, more than 25 percent of the population across just Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Wyoming doesn’t have access to sufficient broadband.

“Lack of broadband in the heartland isn’t just a ‘heartland issue,’” says Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, a philanthropic organization with an arm focused exclusively on funding community-driven solutions to bridge the digital divide. “The effects reverberate across the country—across the globe.”

Emphasizing this point, a recent Deloitte study found that a 10-percentage-point increase in broadband access in 2014 would have added in 2019 more than 875,000 jobs and $186 billion more in economic output.

“Poor internet and broadband exacerbates inequality and impedes economic growth—especially for rural communities and communities of color,” says Walker. “Expanding high-quality internet access is essential for full economic, social, civic and cultural participation.”

Philanthropic organizations working on digital access, such as Ford Foundation, are rising to meet this challenge through community-driven, cross-sector partnerships and grants that touch everything from agriculture to infrastructure to community outreach and beyond.

“Nothing can happen in a vacuum,” says Walker. “The goal is to power innovation and fuel meaningful collaboration that breeds stronger, more connected communities.”

Below are three approaches to closing the digital divide that are making America’s heartland stronger.

Connecting Farmland to Broadband

Home to more than 1,400 farms, McLean County, Illinois was the top corn and soybean producer in the nation last year, according to a 2023 report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. With few signs of agricultural demand slowing, reliable broadband has never been more essential to a farm’s bottom line. And yet, results from an April 2023 broadband infrastructure survey painted a picture of slow internet speed, inconsistent connections and poor download times pausing business operations and hurting productivity.

One respondent, a local tree farmer, noted that relying on walkie-talkies to communicate outside was more reliable than cell service which tended to be “spotty in the trees.” Another farmer flagged an egregious $132 monthly charge for a slow, unreliable network noting that, “in this digital age, high-speed internet is a necessity, not a luxury.”

The survey was conducted as part of the Broadband Breakthrough initiative, a 17-county community engagement and broadband planning program across rural Illinois created in partnership between the University of Illinois’ “Illinois Extension” program and the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, a 43-year-old nonprofit organization working to bring national access to affordable, high-performance broadband for all. Delivered electronically and by paper, the data tool analyzed the nature of rural residents’ existing broadband service and guided them through internet speed tests. “The survey lets people in the county know there’s an effort to get better broadband, and specifically asks questions of farmers and farmer-supported businesses that are big parts of our economy,” says Adrianne Furniss, executive director of the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society.

Community survey findings signaled that respondents plan to use precision agriculture in the future, a type of crop management system that embraces broadband and other innovative technologies such as drones and sensors for on-farm security or collecting data from the field. For example, precision agriculture technologies can inform decisions about what pesticide or herbicide to use on certain crops at a certain time, or the best fields to sow a precise amount of fertilizer to improve crop yields. Yet, Furniss notes that broadband providers typically follow the money to more densely populated areas first.

“In their farmhouses and farm offices, fields and their communities, farmers need to overcome inadequate broadband which limits productivity and growth, and hinders their ability to connect to markets, information and each other,” she explains.

The next iteration of Broadband Breakthrough continues with support from the Ford Foundation. Unlike the pilot in Illinois, this Ford-funded project mentors rural communities in Missouri and includes new partner organizations. The grant also is funding the second year of the Show Me Broadband Coalition, a collective of education, business, health care, housing economic development as well as state and local government stakeholders—all committed to a shared mission of bringing fast, reliable and affordable internet to every Missourian. Together, they work to ensure the needs of communities—from farmers to teachers to families—are central in shaping how broadband resources are utilized, and ready underserved counties to receive state and federal broadband funding. Ultimately, Furniss says, the two efforts are designed to work in tandem: As Broadband Breakthrough graduates transition out of the program, they can join the Show Me Broadband Coalition to participate in the future of broadband governance.

“These programs are really mentoring communities to speak for themselves and to each others to find common ground to achieve digital equity in Missouri,” says Furniss, adding that the overarching benefit of closing the digital divide through improved internet access is this: Better broadband leads to a thriving democracy because it increases individual opportunity and strengthens the communities.

Energizing the Heartland

As remote learning supplemented classroom learning in 2020, some students in Bond County, Illinois, were forced to relocate to a local veterans’ bar in order to complete their homework. As the sole place in town with dependable, accessible internet, students spent their days at the bar completing assignments alongside customers because their own broadband internet was unreliable, unaffordable or unavailable at home.

It’s situations like these that illuminate the disparities that a lack of affordable, high-speed internet can create. Bond County’s circumstances are not altogether uncommon in the heartland. The prevalence of these disparities was the motivation behind the creation of Heartland Forward’s initiative, Connecting the Heartland . Heartland Forward is a nonpartisan, nonprofit “think-and-do tank” dedicated to accelerating economic growth in the middle of the country—the 20 states that make up the fourth largest GDP in the world.

“The number one economic issue of our time is connecting the heartland to accessible and affordable high-speed internet,” says Angie Cooper, executive vice president for Heartland Forward, “it’s the way we search for jobs, access health care and have a better quality of life. If we're going to grow our economies, if we're going to grow our communities, we have to solve for this.”

Key to attaining that goal is Heartland Forward’s Connecting the Heartland initiative, a multi-state and multi-pronged strategy that amplifies the organization’s work as a resource to states and communities as they invest in high-speed internet to grow jobs, improve digital literacy, and reduce education and health disparities. With a focus on expanding access to affordable, high-speed internet, the first phase launched in 2021 across five states: Arkansas, Illinois, Tennessee, Ohio and Oklahoma.

Partnering with the League of United Latin American Citizens, members of Heartland Forward rolled up their sleeves and put boots to the ground to become a trusted resource for the Hispanic community, a group disproportionately affected by the digital divide. Prioritizing the distribution of information in both English and Spanish, they leveraged media and grassroots outreach to connect with families about internet availability, costs and adoption. They ran radio ads, hand-delivered flyers to mailboxes, knocked door-to-door, and bought billboards.

Grassroots outreach will continue with Accelerate, a program launching in June 2024 to support tribal and other local communities in northeast Oklahoma. Specifically, it aims to help heartland communities build their broadband infrastructures and digital skills plans. The program, in partnership with the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, includes webinars that support community leaders in identifying their broadband goals. Additional public-private partnerships engage fellow nonprofits, businesses, industry sectors, and key government stakeholders—from state broadband to mayoral offices. “Closing the digital divide in the heartland requires thinking outside the box, building strategic partnerships, and taking meaningful action,” Cooper explains.

And there are measurable results: To date, Heartland Forward has helped to connect 120,000 previously unserved households with high-speed internet and facilitated digital skills training and support for more than 20,000 residents.

Heartland Forward has received generous support from the Ford Foundation. Cooper shares that the funding allowed them to assess how a lack of high-speed internet impacts health care. This project includes a partnership with the Public Library Association to create a telehealth online curriculum. The module, unveiled in the spring of 2024, provides digital skills training and education to both local library staff and community residents. It takes visitors through every stage of their telehealth experience, from the internet speed needed to connect with doctors to what type of insurance is required to cover the virtual visit.

Partnering for Infrastructure

The city of Selma rests in the Alabama Black Belt Region, a nod to the rich black soil of the area. Still, there’s another, less visible characteristic of the Queen City: rural communities that do not have access to modern, affordable broadband that can support the full range of applications needed today. “This area is in desperate need of investment, especially for communications,” says Seth Hoedl, president of the Post Road Foundation. With support from Ford Foundation, Post Road, will play a pivotal role in facilitating the development of “Yellowhammer Network,” a $230 million cutting-edge, fiber-optic-based broadband project recently announced by the Mayor of Selma and Meridiam, a large international infrastructure investor. Currently, the Census Bureau estimates that 46 percent of households in the Black Belt Region do not subscribe to broadband—nearly twice that of the national average. The Census Bureau’s definition of broadband, however, does not reflect the most modern standards. The percentage of Black Belt households that do not subscribe to cutting-edge broadband, as defined by the FCC, for example, would likely be substantially higher. As a consequence, “An investment like this can be transformative, enabling people to flourish and participate in the 21st century economy,” says Hoedl.

The Post Road Foundation foresees an economic impact that benefits families, businesses and communities. For example, once the fiber network is complete in the next five years, residents will be able to participate in remote work just as households with fiber-based broadband in Washington (DC), New York, and California can do today.

Post Road Foundation is working with local governments, utility companies, internet service providers, community benefit organizations, and Meridiam to advance the digital equity goals of the Yellowhammer Network. This will help to close the digital divide in Selma and adjacent regions by ensuring that fiber broadband is accessible and affordable for all 53,000 households and businesses within Yellowhammer Network’s footprint. One of its principal partners in that effort is the Ford Foundation, whose grant funding provided critical pre-development capital to secure the project’s financing and supported stakeholder collaboration.

The project will install fiber-optic cable on existing telephone or electric poles, while also laying fiber underground in some areas. Fiber-optic cable uses light to transmit information through glass cables at lightning-fast speed. Yellowhammer Network will be an open-access network that allows multiple internet service providers to compete over the same fiber optic network, a unique feature that is common in Europe but unusual here in the U.S. Initially, Yellowhammer will host only one internet service provider, Omnipoint, but in the long term Hoedl says that “competition will result in better, more affordable service.”

Eighty percent of Selma’s households already subscribe to internet access. But much of the territory has service through slower and less reliable technologies, like phone line-based DSL, cable or satellite, explains Hoedl. “These internet options are often more expensive and less reliable in rural areas; fiber is faster, higher capacity, more durable and cost-efficient long term,” he says.

Hoedl calls fiber-based broadband a “build-once” kind of project expected to last 40 to 50 years that’s easily upgradeable since "85 percent of the upfront cost is people going up polls or digging trenches."

Post Road is also working on a similar broadband project in Memphis, Tennessee. According to census data, Selma is nearly 80 percent Black; Memphis 64 percent. In both Selma and Memphis, Post Road and its partners intend to provide opportunities for students at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) to participate in on-the-ground outreach to communities most affected by the digital divide. Post Road’s grassroots approach also includes partnering with the faith community and community-based organizations to be part of outreach.

In addition to supporting broadband applications like video conferencing, e-mail and web browsing, the fiber networks in both Alabama and Memphis will be able to support advanced telehealth and smart grid applications, technologies that Post Road is developing in partnership with professors at Massachusetts General Hospital and with the U.S. Department of Energy. For example, emerging medical technologies enable cyber-secure, “hospital at home” applications for the treatment of chronic health issues, recovery from surgery, and aging in place. This achieves a level of care comparable to that provided by a hospital, but at lower costs and with significantly greater comfort and outcomes for the patient. Long term, Post Road expects that the fiber network in Selma will enable residents there to have access to these and other types of applications, further amplifying the economic and human development impact of the Yellowhammer project.

Powering Collaborative Solutions

"Reliable, high-speed internet is essential in the heartland and everywhere—it’s the foundation of a successful business, a necessity for sustainable farming practices and increased food production, a critical tool for education and health outcomes, and a key driver of community engagement and digital innovation." And the solution is not one-size-fits-all, but a palette of ideas, individuals and institutions that, with support from philanthropy, can make high-speed internet access a reality. “Philanthropy can and must play a critical convening role, to ensure groups across sectors and geographies are able to bring forward the most innovative ideas and approaches to solve one of the most consequential issues of our time,” says Walker. Because in harnessing the power of collaboration, organizations are helping to make high-speed broadband more accessible and affordable in the heartland—building bridges from problems to solutions, and creating stronger, more connected communities.

Sponsored content developed in partnership with POLITICO Focus that appeared in POLITICO

The Benton Institute for Broadband & Society is a non-profit organization dedicated to ensuring that all people in the U.S. have access to competitive, High-Performance Broadband regardless of where they live or who they are. We believe communication policy - rooted in the values of access, equity, and diversity - has the power to deliver new opportunities and strengthen communities.

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Broadband Delivers Opportunities and Strengthens Communities