Corn, computers and cellular phones: Indiana farmers call on technology to boost yields and profits.

• Author: Barlow, David

Ah...the country. Fresh air. The simple life.

Only if you re a visitor. These days, country living is high-tech business. As the overseer of a big-acre business that demands round-the-clock attention, who better than the farmer to hook up to the convenience of a cellular telephone, or to simplify his management tasks with the right software program?

Out here, County Road 13 might as well be Wall Street, with networking systems that connect field computers to home-based PCs, and tractors that tap into Uncle Sam's national defense satellites to help increase annual yields.

Farming has always been a science, but as an up-and-coming computer science, new standards are being set in the way of time and resource efficiency, and ultimately, in the way of yield production.

So don't let the quiet days and fresh air fool you. The technology is out there - quantifying rainfall, calculating soil type combinations and breaking down seed-yield ratios. In short, tightening tolerances for a new kind of precision farming.

One of the latest conveniences developed for farmers combines cellular, remote monitoring and microprocessor technologies.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that farmers were some of the first to embrace the go-anywhere cellular-telephone technology. "Most bigger farms already have cellular phones, so they are familiar with the technology," says Terry Roush, sales manager for Sprint Cellular in the South Bend area.

"As a matter of fact," he says, "many farmers are perhaps more familiar with technology in general than are many business people. You figure someone who is farming 2,000-plus acres, has big money invested in capital equipment, and tracks the markets daily has to know what he's doing."

While the latest cellular advances - for example, faxing capabilities - have been geared to the more metropolitan business person, some recent tailoring of the technology has created a valuable tool for farmers.

Lindsay, an irrigation equipment manufacturing company, offers a cellular option as a way for the farmer to communicate with his mechanical irrigation pivot. A cellular telephone connects to the sprinkler system's logic board. From the next field over, from his home or from a vacation spot 500 miles away, the farmer can call and "talk to" his sprinkler's control panel.

"A lot more interest is being shown in cellular technology for remote monitoring and control," says Fred Freihofer, Sprint Cellular's South Bend general manager. "The...