Farmers have been running a lot of aspects of their operations, getting Markets, Weather and Information from Smart Phones for more than a few years. Between 93-95% of them use 'Smart Phones', which has become their 'Broadband' Connection as the Moguls dither and posture about deploying same in Rural America. (It's more about Market Hegemony than technological issues-but that's a different story.
If any company wants to REALLY engage this group, making their Product, Program or Service accessible to Smart Phones will make them a keeper to this demographic-even after the "Powers that be" get around to that Rural Broadband.
The beautiful vistas of the heartland are hardly short on clouds, but a new type may fundamentally change the way farmers work.
Cloud computing and Internet services for agriculture are growing in popularity, allowing farmers to keep better track of their assets — from crops to livestock to expenses.
Despite the bucolic mental image of hard labor by hand, farmers tend to be on the cutting edge of technology. (Their iPhones are 30-ft.-long, $60,000 hay balers.) Cloud startups have largely served their own industry — technology — first, but increasingly they are specializing and expanding into industry verticals. Agriculture, of course, is a big one, alongside healthcare, financial services, energy and defense.
The New York Times‘ Randall Stross profiles a few of these companies, which include Ann Arbor, Mich.-based FarmLogs, which tracks and centralizes crop activity; Croatia’s Farmeron, which brings analytics to livestock management; and Mountain View, Calif.-based Solum, which focuses on soil analysis.
“In essence,” Stross writes, “Solum and other start-ups are building the technology to allow farmers to benefit from data science.”
Can Silicon Valley bring a little more silicon to America’s valleys? Looks like it.
Photo: Krone