Federated Farmers says fast, reliable broadband access is necessary if agri-business is to reach its productive potential. Simon Hendery reports.
In a shallow trench beside a gravel farmhouse driveway 30km from town, plastic ducting and a few centimetres of soil hide a fibre-optic cable.
It's 8pm in rural New Zealand and the buried cable is pumping megabytes of data between the isolated homestead and the rest of the world.
Weather records from a network of sensors around the farm are being collated and sent to a corporate data centre for further analysis, along with similar data collected from hundreds of other rural properties. Data from a grass quality and moisture-sensing device with GPS sat-nav tracking capabilities, attached to a four-wheel farm-bike, is also being pumped down the fibre pipe for analysis.
The sensor has been quietly soaking up information on grass conditions as the farmer has driven over the property. Once analysed at a data centre, a graphical report providing invaluable insights into the state of the land will be blasted back to the farm PC at broadband speeds.
Reports are being generated from sensors in the farm's milk tanks, these feeding into a wider Fonterra database.
At the same time the farming family are completing the day's online banking and watching a movie on cable TV. This is farming in the future, and, as enthusiasts of the concept of "fibre-to-the-farm" hope, it is a future that is not too far away.
"Farming in the new millennium is a highly technological business for which fast and reliable data transfer is essential," says Federated Farmers in a submission on the Government's "rural broadband initiative," a $300 million project running in parallel with the ultra-fast broadband network build-out.
"Central government, local government, banks and other service and supply businesses rely on electronic means to deal with farm businesses," Federated Farmers says.
"There are significant productivity gains to be had from increasing the quantity and quality of broadband internet provision in agriculture. In the modern environment, fast, reliable broadband access is necessary if agricultural businesses are to reach their productive potential and realise opportunities in the global marketplace."
Under the rural initiative the Government is promising "a step change in the standard of rural broadband services". It plans to connect 97 per cent of schools to fibre links of at least 100 Mbps, with the rest connected at least 10 Mbps. It is also promising 97 per cent of households and businesses will be able to access broadband of at least 5 Mbps or faster, with the most hard-to-reach 3 per cent receiving connections of at least 1 Mbps.
The rural initiative does not mean the entire country will be criss-crossed with fibre-optic cabling. Wireless broadband technologies are expected to be a more viable option for meeting targets in many areas.
The Government expects to call for bids this month from technology companies wanting a slice of the project and it says allocation of funding to successful bidders should start before the end of the year.
More than three-quarters of Fonterra's suppliers, for example, already access some form of broadband, most commonly over a satellite service. A high percentage of the dairy co-operative's suppliers use the internet to access Fonterra's Fencepost.com portal, which provides a range of services from near-real-time volume data on the milk collected by tankers from their vats, cash-flow planning tools based on payout forecasts, and video broadcast of Fonterra corporate announcements. Satellite broadband providers including Farmside boast thousands of subscribers to their services, which cost between $70 and $230 a month, depending on download speeds and data caps.
In its discussion paper on the rural broadband initiative, the Ministry of Economic Development said though satellite services were available to even the most remote locations, costs and limited download speeds meant satellite connectivity alone was not capable of providing the broadband economic boost the sector needed.
It said better use could be made of the traditional copper phoneline network. By adding additional broadband equipment to the fixed-line phone network, broadband of 1Mbps or faster could be delivered through 87 per cent of rural phone lines.
