Ag producers are the big winners as broadband Internet construction begins

 
Tuesday marked a significant milestone for our rural Rock County residents.
Rock County Broadband Alliance broke ground on a $14 million project to bring high-speed Internet service to all residents living outside the city of Luverne.
RCBA is a subsidiary of Alliance Communications Cooperative based in Garretson, South Dakota.
The co-op received a $5 million state grant to expand its fiber-to-the-home service that served parts of western Rock County to the rest of the county.
The Sept. 1 groundbreaking means within the next 15 months an additional 1,350 households and businesses in eastern Rock County will have improved Internet service, with 265 of those having Internet service of any type for the first time.
For many of Rock County’s rural residents and farm business, this will be revolutionary.
With up to 100 megabytes available, producers will be able to send production information from their farm implements to their mobile or desktop computers within seconds.
For some producers the planting dates, population rates and crop varieties for individual fields take hours to download or have to be transcribed from paper notes. With adequate broadband access, field records can expand beyond basic planting information to include soil temperatures, wind directions, fertilizer rates, pesticide applications with the time of date automatically noted.
For those who are used to the technology, productivity could increase with the computer taking care of the basic records, allowing producers to make critical day-to-day decisions with more information and more quickly.
Improved connectivity to the Internet could also mean less down time for farm equipment during critical production schedules.
Equipment computer repairs can be done remotely, sometimes as far as 30 miles away, instead of on site.
All this requires adequate Internet service.
When data takes minutes, rather than seconds, to transmit, problem-solving opportunities are lost — as is valuable production time.
For livestock producers improved Internet service can provide up-to-the minute images and information on their saleable stock online.
Out in the barn, farmers can more easily use their mobile devices to access breeding records, medications, manure applications and feed rations.
Keeping information in the cloud allows that data to be retrieved on the road, at livestock sales or breed shows.
Late next year, Rock County will have Internet access to 100 percent of its farms, 25 percent more than the rest of Minnesota. It will lift us out of the bottom 10 percent of the state with high-speed access.
Currently, only 15 percent of our county’s residents have access to at least 10 megabytes per second download and six megabytes per second upload, which the federal government defines as high-speed Internet.
After December 2016, everyone in Rock County will have the high-speed Internet option.
Now that’s something our agricultural-based county can be proud of.