In the race to claim space on the information highway, farmers are leading the pack, says an Ontario internet consultant.
“The trend is on a steep upward slope,” said Helen Aitkin with the Guelph, Ont. firm Agribiz.net, an internet consulting group that specializes in keeping agriculture in the electronic loop.
She describes the momentum that’s driving farmers and the rest of the agriculture industry down the information highway as “get on or move out.
“It is the culture of the industry today.”
Read Also
Canola council cuts field agronomy team
The Canola Council of Canada is cutting its agronomy team as part of a “refreshed strategic framework.”
There is no way to determine exactly how many producers are using the internet as a tool on their farms, but sporadic studies indicate 10 to 15 percent of farmers have tapped into the technology.
Eleven percent of the 680 farmers surveyed in Ontario are on the internet, according to a provincial government study done in November 1996. Similar results were reported in a survey conducted by the Royal Bank, which said nine to 16 percent of farmers in Canada use the net.
Similar findings are turning up south of the border.
A survey last year by @griculture Online, an internet site published by Successful Farming magazine in the United States, found about 10 percent of U.S. farmers were online.
Editor John Walter said 25 percent of the readers of the 480,000-circulation magazine said they planned to go on-line in the near future, and 40 percent said they wanted to be on-line.
“Our own site has been a barometer of dramatic growth over the last year,” Walter said in an e-mail interview.
“We received more than two million page accesses from some 150,000 visitors during January. This was about a 25 percent increase in traffic over the previous month.”
Aitken said while it doesn’t hurt to be on the cutting edge of technology, farmers are logging on because it makes good business sense.
The internet gives farmers ready access to information on markets, weather and production techniques used around the world.
