Equipment:Technology:Communication
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Communication is an ever increasing important facet of modern agriculture. Communication internally, with input suppliers, with the rest of the world for information gathering. We rely heavily on the internet and email on this farm. Email is one of the best advances in communication as it provides a log of communication between individuals, thus avoiding any confusion or lack of clarity that might develop over time as to what was said and when it was said. This tool is especially important when conducting business, bidding jobs, or even purchasing inputs. Even if a "deal" is done over the phone I will still write everything up as an email and send it to all respective parties and then they have to sign off on the email (and the specifics it contains) before something proceeds.
Email also is efficient in that it allows everyone to respond when it's convient for them. Somethings are still most efficiently done with a telephone, but even some of these communication tasks can be better done with "texting" rather than a phone call. For example, I would rather see one of our truckers at harvest simply throw a quick text out as to what the moisture was from the last load as opposed to getting on the phone and making a call.
For internet service on the farm we are stuck with Wildblue. There top package yields only a 1.5 gb/s connection and they have a volume cap on the service. However, until I find a better solution it beats the heck out of dial-up.
WildBlue dish at farm office.
Wildblue modem at farm office. The white computer next to the modem is dedicated to handling the internet and DHCP duties in the office. With this dedicated computer I can keep the rest of the farm network completely shielded from the rest of the internet world.
I'm also running a non-line of site bridge from the farm office to two farm houses. The panel antenna with wings is my bridge antenna. I use Buffalo HP54G switches on each side of the bridge. The Buffalo's have 1/2 watt amps in them already and then I have an inline 1 watt amp on the push side at the farm office. The flat panel and yagi anntenna's also shown in this picture are for bringing in 800 Mhz (like Alltel) phone signal and 1900 Mhz (like Nex-tech) phone signals.
I'm using a dual-frequency Wi-Ex amp/repeater for getting the cell coverage throughout the farm office and shop. We also run some mobile amp/booster systems from both Wilson and Wi-Ex.In the farm office we also run a secured wireless network as well as have a few hardwired machines.
Dietrich's main desktop area with dual-screen Dell and laptop shown. The large majority of our office computers are not the latest, greatest machines. I build a lot of computers so many of the machines in use are Frankenstein machines in that they are comprised of parts from many different computers. Speed/size is not a big concern as some of the computers are used for no more than surfing the internet, email and some basic office software usage. As such, we are still running a couple of 700 Mhz AMD machines.
For backup I use a three tiered approach. 1) daily backups are done using one of the two harddrives on the left of the black computer, 2)daily backups of mission critical data are backed up on a thumbdrive to but in my pocket when I go home and static unchanging raw data (like raw yield data) is backed up to DVD's every so often and then stored offsite.Living way out in the country, I do have most of the computers and the network components behind UPC's that will give me 20 minutes of run time in the event the power goes completely out or more importantly will protect everything from the power surging and/or brief power outages more common in windy or stormy conditions.
We have neither a telegraph system nor a FAX system due to their antiquity. Faxing has been easily replaced with scanned pdf files that are then emailed.
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