On a cold January day in a crowded general store in 1879, a group of farmers gathered around the potbelly stove to catch up on the latest news from around the county. This was the primary method of communicating the latest news in agriculture.

Fifty years later it was the radio that brought the farm community together. Legendary farm broadcasters on powerful regional stations such as WLW and WLS covered the latest developments in agronomy and animal nutrition as well as home economics. Their programs lasted for hours and were extremely popular with the entire farm family.

Then along came television and, again, agricultural information found its place on the tube. In the 1970s, farm radio networks brought farm news to the local station in small towns across the Midwest. By the 1980s, satellite technology brought the news and markets right to the farm via the DTN box. During the 1990s, the Internet began to become a factor, and farm families could receive and send information via their computers. Today we are seeing yet another revolution in how farmers get agricultural information.
The cellular phone is quickly evolving into a mobile news center. At the same time cell phones are becoming sophisticated, cell phone networks are spreading across the rural landscape. For example, Verizon Wireless has spent $89 million during the past three years to upgrade their high-speed, G3 network in Indiana alone.

Once coverage was only available in large cities and along interstates; but today, while not universal, cell phone coverage in rural areas is quite common. What is interesting is that the cell phone companies are not quite sure what to do with all their new rural customers. All their marketing and services are geared to urban users.

In a recent media usage study conducted by the National Assoc. of Farm Broadcasters (NAFB), cell phones showed up for the first time as a source farmers use for obtaining daily informational updates. While it was not a major source, the fact that is showed up at all indicates that more and more producers are using their cell phones to stay in touch with the markets and farm news.

It is not just teens, hockey moms, or business executives that always have a cell phone in their hand. With the new emerging rural market, there are some changes the cell companies need to make.
First, get some better ringtones. Enough with the funk, the rap and the techno sounds - how about some fiddles, animal noises and tractor-pull sounds? Same thing with the wallpaper that comes installed on the phones - in addition to the modern art, include some pastures, cornfields, rodeo bulls or John Deere tractors. Speaking of which, how about a John Deere phone? The Deere colors and logo are on everything else from ball caps to women’s underwear, so why not a cell phone? You could program it for one button dialing to the nearest John Deere parts office.

Of course, these phones do much more than make phone calls. In fact, on one phone I used, the details on how to make a call did not appear until page 56 of the instruction manual. Texting is a major feature of phones today. Thus, the phones come with a pre-installed dictionary to spell check texts.

Certain words need to be added to these dictionaries such as barrow, silage, FFA, tenderloin and yonder. Many of the phones come with optional covers. They need to have ones in Case red, John Deere green, New Holland blue, and black and gold for the Boilermakers. As for you, the reader, I would suggest you invest in this new technology. More and more of the time, critical information that communicators (like me) provide will be available on these phones. The markets and the news that drive them are moving at an ever increasing speed.

You can no longer wait until the end of the day to find out what is happening in your industry. Make 2009 the year you get on the line or online.

A detailed review of specific cell phones and their application to agriculture can be found at www.hatchat.net

The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of Farm World. Readers with questions or comments for Gary Truitt may write to him in care of this publication.