Agriculture + Broadband = Fighting Climate Change

Advanced broadband is a high-tech phenomenon of today. Farming is a practice that stretches back ten thousand years. Together, they can help fight the continuing impact of climate change. Today’s high-tech farming depends on data – from remote sensors, from tractors, irrigation equipment, nutrient application machinery, and harvesters that communicate. Sensors and tracking devices around a modern farm can pump out readings from soil moisture to fertilizer needs to climate conditions inside a chicken house. The US Department of Agriculture reported in 2019 that 22% of farmers used DSL technology, which is old and slow compared to what most Americans can access. Twenty-six percent of farms used satellite, which has broad coverage but tends to be more expensive and not as technically advanced. And three percent (more than 40,000 farms) still use dial-up, which was the go-to internet technology of the early 1990s. So, it’s not just any old broadband that agriculture needs – it’s high-performance broadband. In the future, it's important that upload speeds be as good as download speeds. After all, precision agriculture is about sending data – not just receiving it.

Sometimes lack of advanced broadband in rural America is seen as a rural problem. But that’s not right. It’s a problem for us all to consider. Agricultural land is an immediately available, low-cost means of tackling climate change. Farmland and ranchland soils can capture carbon, but they require advanced management -- management techniques that broadband can support. Farming can’t solve climate change alone, but advanced broadband to farmers is a necessary part of any solution.

[Lori Sallet is the Media Relations Director at American Farmland Trust. Jonathan is a Senior Fellow at the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society. Together, they own an organic farm on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, preserved under an agricultural conservation easement. ]