Welcome to CyberFarm By Holly Korab In the 1880s when John Reifsteck's grandfather immigrated to east central Illinois from Germany, he hitched a John Deere moldboard plow to the back of a horse to turn the thick prairie soil. It took him several weeks to plow the 160 acres that his grandson now no-tills and plants in half a day. Fields that once produced 80 bushels of corn per acre now yield twice that. "In one generation of farmers we have seen farming go from horses to satellites," says Reifsteck. "And now we're taking it into cyberspace." [Image] John Reifsteck This past July, Reifsteck was one of several farmers from Champaign County, IL, who joined with agribusinesses, computer specialists, and educators to demonstrate what the Internet may do for agriculture. For the two days of the Information Agriculture Conference on high-tech agriculture in Champaign, members of the Agricultural Task Force of the Champaign County Network (CCNet) introduced the conference's 400 attendees to how the Internet may fit into their technology mix. NCSA found itself down on the CyberFarm as part of its support for CCNet, which the center helped the Champaign County Chamber of Commerce launch in 1993. CCNet is a community networking project involving more than 200 people from 70 different businesses and organizations in Champaign County [see access, Summer 1995]. The Agricultural Task Force is one of seven CCNet task forces trying to bring Internet resources to their sector of the community -- in this case, by cultivating the nation's first CyberFarm. "People need to see it and do it to understand," says Chris Schroeder, a principal organizer of CyberFarm and a technology consultant in agriculture. "A lot of light bulbs went off in their heads at CyberFarm." Farming in Cyberspace CyberFarm consisted of CyberFarmer, Farm Office, Input Suppliers, Marketing, Education, and Support Services. Visitors were routed from one booth to the next at 10-minute intervals, stopping at each exhibit long enough to be enticed by a few "what if" scenarios about farming with the aid of cyberspace. For instance, in marketing, employees of three local grain elevators showed a few of the advantages to farmers of online marketing data. Farmers could link to the elevators' Web home pages for information on grain contracts, such as the names of seed varieties the elevators would be buying that year as well as the date they were needed by and their desired moisture content. [Image] John Reifsteck's CyberFarmer home page featured pictures of his farm, family, and the ubiquitous farm tractor. The hyperlink labeled "production" jumped to his records of inputs, yields, and the soil's fertility back to the first soil tests conducted by his father in the 1930s. Information he wanted to keep private was secured behind links accessible only to those with passwords -- an Internet capability many farmers were relieved to see. A row of computers off to one side of the room gave newcomers to cyberspace an opportunity to browse around the Internet. Eager to answer questions were members of the Agriculture Task Force, most of whom had been novices themselves just a few months earlier. In fact, it was in the process of assembling the CyberFarm exhibit that the task force discovered a route along which they could begin charting cyberspace for agriculture. Build the CyberFarm and they will come Prior to CyberFarm, the Agriculture Task Force had struggled for more than a year to identify how and why the agricultural community should tie into the Internet. All CCNet task forces had faced similar obstacles, yet with their own twists. Access to the Internet was a major obstacle for rural areas. Phone lines crossing most of the state's 26 million acres of agricultural land often crackle like a campfire and transmit at speeds too slow for graphics or lengthy text. It is not uncommon to find rural lines transmitting at 9600 bits/second -- significantly slower than the 14,400 bits/second transmission speed of the most common analog modems. Because access is poor, Internet literacy among rural residents is spotty at best. According to Dan Cotton, extension officer in the UIUC's Cooperative Extension Service (CES), this is true even in Illinois, which is one of a handful of states in the nation with any kind of official networking project. Cotton leads CES's Community Internet Project -- which evolved a year ago out of a Rural Datafication Project -- to remove the mystery surrounding the Internet. He familiarizes people with such terms as email, FTP, and Internet. Similar to CCNet, the project targets local movers and shakers who, in turn, teach others in their communities about the Internet. So far, CES has reached about 250 people in 14 counties. A surprising roadblock for the Agriculture Task Force, however, is precision agriculture -- the latest buzzword in agriculture that many industry experts believe will drive online services. Precision agriculture tries to maximize inputs to outputs by linking such high-tech equipment as variable-rate applicators and combine yield monitors with computerized records of yields, fertilizer inputs, GIS data, and satellite images from the Global Positioning Systems. The Internet could be the golden link among all these databases. However only about 7,500 farmers within the entire Corn Belt practice this technology, so it is unclear which technology will drive which. This uncertainty distracted the Agriculture Task Force until they began refocusing on people's need to be connected. Instead of counting on precision agriculture to pull the rest of agriculture onto the Internet, they emphasized the benefits to precision agriculture of having an infrastructure in place for exchanging data as those resources became widely available. They adopted the "build it and they will come" approach to Internet access. The task force set out to build a core of Internet-savvy farmers by getting 50 on email by summer. Because of bandwidth limitations, email proved a more powerful draw than did browsers. Email also cut across all aspects of the farmers' lives -- they could set up meetings, form social groups, and solve practical problems, says Kent Krukewitt, president of the Champaign County Farm Bureau and CCNet member in charge of enrolling farmers. Within the shrinking population of farmers, says Krukewitt, a farmer may be the only person in his county experimenting with a new cropping practice. If he is on the Internet, the neighbor he may turn to for advice can be located in Nebraska as easily as in the next county. The 50-farmers goal got the task force off dead center, but what galvanized them was CyberFarm. "Every group needs some event to rally around," says Schroeder. "For CCNet's Education Task Force, it was connecting the schools; for the Business Task Force, an Internet fair; for us, it was CyberFarm." In January the task force was invited to make a presentation at this inaugural conference for precision agriculture by Harold Reetz, CCNet member and Midwest director of the Potash & Phosphate Institute, the conference organizer. Within six months, people who once had been skittish about email were designing Web documents and learning about computer networks -- though not without help. The AIM Lab in the UIUC's College of Agricultural, Consumer, and Environmental Sciences created their Web pages and is maintaining them until the task force is ready to assume responsibility for them. To access the Web exhibit, use the address at left. CES and NCSA loaned CCNet 12 computers for CyberFarm (some were set aside for Net surfing). The local telecommunications company, Ameritech, ran six ISDN lines into the exhibit hall; other businesses provided hardware, software, and LCD panels. The most significant accomplishment of CyberFarm was that it forced the task force to articulate what resources they believed could make the Internet useful to farming. The event provided that all-important deadline, says Karen Coaldrake, coordinator for the Food and Agribusiness Management Program in UIUC's Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics, who helped coordinate CyberFarm. "It's like learning to swim. You don't until you're invited to someone's pool. It gives you a reason to learn." On to greener acres Since the demonstration, the Agriculture Task Force has received many requests to take CyberFarm on the road. They have declined all but one -- returning to the Information Agriculture Conference in 1997 to showcase their latest accomplishments. One deadline, they decided, was sufficient to nudge them along without distracting them from their original goal of exploring new Internet applications for agriculture. After harvest season ended in October, the task force once again set about recruiting farmers for the Internet. They had fallen 15 participants short of their 50-CyberFarmer goal when their efforts were stalled by planting season. Reaching the 50-farmer mark will give them some leverage with another goal -- that of convincing agribusiness that the Internet can serve functions other than email and advertising. Schroeder would like to see them using it to serve their customers, and he is convinced it will make them more competitive if they do so. Any companies that want to hear from farmers about the kinds of information they want from businesses are welcome to join CCNet. Says Schroeder, "If we get 50 farmers in Champaign County using email, that's the highest density of farmers on the Internet any place in the world, as far as I know. That's a good test market." .