How the Farm Bill could subsidize a revolution in high-tech farming

The ongoing Farm Bill negotiations may mean linking millions of Americans to the 21st century economy and taking a step toward the broader dream of high-tech agriculture.

Since the last Farm Bill was passed in 2018, the federal government has spent billions to try to bring high-speed internet to the nearly 12 million rural households that don’t have it.

“It’s been clear for a long time how critical an internet connection is to the future of everything, from education and health care to business and everyday life,” Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) said in a March statement promoting his Rural Internet Improvement Act.

That’s one of the many bills that could be rolled together into the approximately $1.4 trillion omnibus Farm Bill.

That money will fund and set guidelines around federal subsidies for causes ranging from rural energy, crop insurance and, above all, nutrition.

Read more from The Hill’s special coverage on the future of broadband here.

Since 2018, high-speed internet — once seen as a luxury — has been discussed in the same vital terms as issues like disaster funding for drought.

The Farm Bill package passed in that year included funding for the Reconnect program, which subsidizes broadband providers to bring high-speed internet to rural areas that lack it.

But federal standards have struggled to keep up with existing technology. The 2018 guidelines target where 50 percent of the population or more had download speeds of less than 10 megabytes per second (or 1 Mbps) and uploads of less than 1 megabytes per second (MBs).

In current terms, that speed quota is obsolete: It’s barely fast enough to stream video and would struggle to carry a Zoom call.

By contrast, a 2022 report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) moved the target up to 25 Mbps download and 3 MBs upload.

By that standard, about 14.5 million Americans lack access to broadband, with 75 percent of them residing in rural areas, according to the Federal Communications Commission.

The reasons are inherent to rural American life: sparsely populated, with often-difficult terrain punctuated by widely separated towns whose populations skew older and with less formal schooling than the cities, according to CRS.

Those are all factors which raise the cost of installing and maintaining broadband, even as they diminish the demand for the service. With each mile of broadband cable costing about $27,000 to install, according to the Department of Transportation, internet companies stand to lose money without public funding. 

Those factors have all contributed to the “digital divide” between rural and urban.

And even the 25 Mbps limit may be too slow. In a March letter to the heads of both parties’ congressional agriculture committees, a coalition of rural broadband installers and customers asked for the download limits to be set at a blistering 100 MBs.

Meeting that speed limit was the requirement for providers looking to participate in the last round of Reconnect — which has received $3.1 billion over the past 3 years.

And even with those restrictions, the program didn’t have enough funding to give loans or grants to all of the applicants, the coalition noted.

That was proof that “setting a high standard for network and service capabilities does not deter applicants whatsoever, but rather demonstrates a surplus of interest by providers willing and able to deliver better broadband in rural America that will rival what is available to urban users,” the letter reads.

An immediate step is simply getting that program funded again — like many Farm Bill programs, Reconnect was only funded for five years, and the funding ran out in 2022.

One impetus behind the push for rural broadband is unleashing the economic potential of rural America.

Large-scale agriculture in America relies on farm equipment like tractors and combines that are increasingly in continual contact and conversation with satellites overhead, and moisture and soil sensors in the fields — allowing for the precise and automated delivery of seed, water, pesticides and fertilizer.

“Enabled by machine learning, sensors can assess field conditions and implements can respond immediately with ‘on-the-go’ decisions,” the NTCA-Rural Broadband Association wrote in a 2021 report.

The report suggested many future farm tasks could be carried out by drones — which can save considerable weight if they can rely on the cloud computing possibilities of the wider internet for some of their processing.

This, however, requires broadband, Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) told Morning Ag Clips in April.

Warnock that month introduced a bill with Thune — the Promoting Precision Agriculture Act — that would create a federal task force to create connections standards to allow all precision farm equipment and sensors to talk to each other — “Like we have for cell phones,” he said.

“You’ve got to have good rural broadband connection for this equipment to work at its optimum capability,” Warnock added. “This will not only help farmers but will also help rural communities in general.”

Those communities also want access to the same opportunities that have become ubiquitous for urban residents.

That means access to services “from online business startups to digital learning and telemedicine,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) said in a statement introducing the Rural Broadband Protection Act.

That is a bill Capito introduced in February with Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) that would require applicants who get federal funding to deliver broadband actually can deliver it.

“In 2023, we should be able to bring high-speed internet to every community in our country, regardless of their ZIP code,” Klobuchar said in a statement about the bill.

This push for added scrutiny up front suggests something of the wrangling to come. While everyone agrees more broadband is better, the peculiarities of what that will look like are thornier — both around speeds and who gets priority for federal funding.

Thune, who represents sparsely populated South Dakota, wants funding to target areas where 90 percent of households don’t have broadband — which means in essence that federal funders would be starting with the hardest problems first.

In a February hearing, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) argued that any definition of “rural” for broadband purposes couldn’t use definitions made for the West — but also had to consider the very different dynamics of the rural Northeast.

In states like New Jersey, tiny, remote hamlets and farmer’s fields might sit just a few miles outside of nearby cities — but be just as cut off from broadband networks as any farmhouse in the Nebraska Sandhills.

Agricultural state senators, meanwhile, are facing immense pressure from their constituents to take what worked from the 2018 Farm Bill and roll it out across the country.

“It seems like every rural development hearing we have turns into a broadband hearing,” one House Agriculture Committee staffer told the National Association of Counties.

“So I think we’re going to be particularly focused on that.”