Steve Cubbage: Time to 'Unwire' the Farm for the Future

The 1920s might have been roaring for the glitzy urban crowd. Back on the farm, though, things were still pretty quiet. That’s because rural electricity was about as rare as Google Fiber is today.

However, the wiring of rural America and the technology that came with it transformed farms into economic and agricultural powerhouses. Today, nearly 100 years later, we are once again at a crossroad, one of history and technology.

This time, the revolution down on the farm will not come from the wiring but rather the unwiring of the country beyond the interstate exit ramps. In recent months, there has been talk about broadband infrastructure in the news. In January, President Donald Trump made it a centerpiece of his address at the American Farm Bureau Federation convention. More recently, there was a brief discussion in the headlines about the government nationalizing the next generation wireless network known as 5G.

Why is this so important? Because it’s the classic chicken and egg conundrum. The possibilities of Big Data and the Internet of Things will continue to progress at the speed of your first dial-up modem unless real wireless broadband grows outside its urban incubators. It’s known as the digital divide, and here’s the rub. This situation looks eerily familiar to the lighted cities and the darkened farms of the 1920s.

In 1920, the U.S. census found for the first time in its history America was more urban than rural. The country now had more than 50% of its population living in cities rather than rural communities.

At the start of the Roaring ’20s, just 35% of U.S. households had electricity. By the end, nearly 68% were electrified. If you don’t count farms, about 85% of Americans had electricity by 1930.

Just like today’s digital divide, rural communities, especially farms, were far behind the curve in adopting electricity compared with the rest of the country. Of the roughly 6.3 million farms in 1922, only about 3% had electricity. The government didn’t begin to address this huge rural versus urban electrical divide until 1935, when it formed the Rural Electrification Administration.

The odds of such a herculean government intervention taking place today to remedy this latest rural/urban disparity is highly unlikely. There just doesn’t seem to be the stomach or the resources for a federal government that’s already $20 trillion in debt. However, it doesn’t mean something big isn’t possible.

It’s going to require some outside-the-box technologies, ideas, players and partnerships that haven’t existed in the past. Some of them are already starting to appear. Tech giant Microsoft recently laid out a bold strategy to eliminate the rural broadband gap within five years.
The company seeks to leverage a technology called TV white space, the now unused portion of the frequency spectrum made available when old analog TV technology went by the wayside.

It’s also affordable, especially compared with current and even potential future cellular technology such as 5G. That’s primary because the average cellphone tower costs in the neighborhood of $250,000 to erect, and it’s lucky to cover a five-mile radius in rough, rural terrain.

It’s time for rural America and all of its stakeholders to realize what is at stake if this opportunity and moment are squandered. One idea is for commodity groups, such as the corn and soybean associations, to use their clout and checkoffs to “own” a nationalized broadband network.

We might love our solitude far away from the bright city lights, but under those lights resides our customers as well as our future. If we don’t focus on this basic utility we put our destiny at risk. Digital duct tape and baling wire will not fix this problem. And if we don’t fix it quick, there will be a lot of high-tech robots and sensors sitting in the fence rows and big piles of big data left to rot.