08/22/07 Ag & the Internet

Ag and the Internet. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. For many years farming was considered about as low tech as you could get. Dig a hole, plant a seed, add some water and wait. Eventually we started to see technology breaking through with the advent of bigger and more refined machinery. Now technology is firmly rooted in agriculture. Even the home computer and the internet is becoming a necessary tool for farmers. New terms like bandwidth and podcasting are not foreign to the farming community and more and more, ag producers are getting information via the internet. Chuck Zimmerman is the owner of ZimmComm an online source for podcasting and blogs. ZIMMERMAN: Our company has, I guess pioneered online communications for agriculture - anything from text to audio to video and communicating directly to farmers themselves or communicating a farm or rural message to a consumer audience. A big issue for computer usage in rural areas has always been access and according to Zimmerman, that is being corrected. ZIMMERMAN: We just saw a report from USDA they do an every two year look at farmer computer ownership and usage, and it showed that high speed internet access with farmers who had internet access had basically doubled in two years. Zimmerman says that the demographic for technology use is not as young as one might think. ZIMMERMAN: I delivered an iPod to a lady in Illinois  she wouldn't tell me her age be she did have nearly grown grandchildren there okay, and she was being delivered an iPod and she just couldn't wait to get it. In fact when I delivered it, she had that grandson there to set it up for her so that she could go ahead and subscribe to some programs she had already picked out on iTunes on her computer. With anything new, it takes a bit of time to become accustomed and it's the same with technology. ZIMMERMAN: We've had this internet revolution now since the early 90's at least so we're going on over a decade that people have had a chance to get to know this and use it and accept it and figure out what it can do for them and as they say, information is power and farmers are no different than your average businessman. The more information they've got the better, hopefully the choices their going to make to run their business. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.