Agriculture goes online.

AuthorPETERSON, ERIC

Alan Foutz was born into Eastern Plains agriculture. He spent his formative years in Akron, due south of Sterling, went away to school, achieved a Ph.D., and worked as a professor at California Polytechnic University in San Luis Obispo. Ultimately, though, he traded the lectures and exams for wheat and sunflower in 1982, when he returned to Akron with his wife, Val, and took over the family farm. That same year, he bought the community's first PC. "It wasn't very long after that that everybody else bought one," Alan recalled.

The mid-'90s brought another neighborhood first when the Eoutz farm got Internet access. And then, last spring, the couple jumped into the e-commerce game with www.AandVCountry Store.com, a site that sells Alan's grains alongside Val's handmade gifts. "It's been a very useful tool for me," Alan said of the web. "We've gotten contacts from Thailand, and everything else." As if selling wheat to a buyer in Asia wasn't enough, the term "everything else" entails quite a bit. Alan now uses e-mail for more than half of his business communication. He leased a tractor online earlier this year and regularly purchases supplies online. The Internet has replaced print and radio as the Foutzes's primary source of market and weather information. Best of all: "My website is starting to pay for itself."

Sure, Alan Foutz is not the average farmer, with his Ph.D. and his work as vice president of the Colorado Farm Bureau. But, as in 1982, his peers are following his lead, turning to the Net in large numbers. Meeting them halfway is a growing throng of e-agriculture businesses, with several players calling Colorado home.

According to the National Agricultural Statistics Service, 29% of all U.S. farms had Internet access last year, more than double the 13% online in 1997. The bigger the farm, the greater the chance it's wired -- just over half of all producers with annual sales of more than $250,000 had Web access in '99. Traditional media continues to reign, however: A 1998 Gallup poll revealed that only 6% of the country's large producers get "a lot" of information from the Web, considerably fewer than those using farm publications (62%) or radio (14%).

In Colorado, farmer access stood well above the national average in '99, at 37%. "Because we have so many hobby farmers right now -- and many of them are techies -- that's why Colorado farmers use the Internet so much," explained Karen Salaz, director of information and media services at...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT