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National Broadband Ireland : implementation and progress
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Sure, modern farms use broadband, but it's not like farms didn't exist or were non-profitable before broadband.
But farms don't depend on broadband as much as other businesses, that's my point. If broadband were non-existent today I'd be surprised to see the farming industry collapse.
What makes farming so hard without broadband today? Genuinely curious.
The vast majority of farms now depend on broadband and would find it extremely difficult to move back to an offline system. They would be required to either take on less work, or hire more employees. I'm not going on a rant here, just giving examples of how I/other farmers I know use the internet seeing as you're curious.
The agfood.ie website: This website is ran by the Dept. of Agriculture. It contains a list of all the animals a farmer owns and everything about them. Where they were born, where they have been before, when they were moved, when they were last tested for TB, genetic information etc. It also contains financial services for farmers, grant applications, nitrates information (how much fertiliser the farmer is allowed to spread) and how many animals a farmer is allowed keep which can change based on what schemes the farmer enters into.
To move an animal to another farm or grazing area owned by someone else, farmers log into www.agfood.ie and have to apply for a certificate of compliance to move them. This is usually granted instantly if the farmer is allowed to move animals (denied if e.g. farm had an animal tested positive for TB) and can be accepted by the receiving farmer on his online system using the cert number. It must be done before moving the animal. Previously this had to be done at a mart or took days via post to the dept. of agriculture and the new owner. Before that, there was no system in place but that's not an option anymore and this system is the reason, if you want to, find out all this information about the beef you buy in the supermarket. The same system is used to register new calves. Multiply all that paperwork by a few hundred and it gets into a lot of work.
Everything used on farm has to be logged. Medicines used on animals, sprays used on land. Everything. There is now a qr code on spray bottles that farmers scan into whatever app they decide to use e.g. herdwatch. This is then logged and can be viewed by auditors (from Bord Bia and Dept. of Ag) at the click of a button. A few weeks ago we had a farm audit by Bord Bia. They are not doing on-farm audits due to covid-19. They required pictures of all housing on the farm, feed storage, safety equipment etc., scans of records both offline and online records. It took me hours to upload everything. Luckily we changed ISP just last week and now have a reliable 50/5 connection instead of about 2/0.2
All cattle and sheep in the country now have an electronic tag. This can be scanned by animal handling equipment that automatically uploads animal weights and can be viewed by farmers on their phone.
On dairy farms, particularly robot milking parlours (common nowadays), support services need to be able to log into the robotic milking systems via teamviewer. These support engineers are often in another country so there's enough lag without a bad internet connection on the farmers end! You won't find many milking parlours built in the last 5-10 years that don't have an internet connection requirement.
Most dairy farms use artificial insemination. A lot of farmers are using collars on their cows. These collars monitor the cow and judging by the cows movements, temperatures etc., can tell the farmer on their phone when a cow is ready to be served. Automatic gates are often set up and based on this data the gate opens and allows the cow into a separate pen. This monitor can tell a farmer that their cow is sick before she has any visible signs also.
Calving cameras - calving cameras have cut down on hours of work and sleepless nights for farmers travelling up and down to out-farms.
Field measurements - I use my phone a lot to measure different sections of fields.
Would the farming industry collapse? No, but similar to if other businesses did not have broadband, it would cause a lot of hardship, time and money.
They definitely find music comforting and we leave on the radio but haven't tried netflix on them, yet
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