SALEM, Ohio — A lack of internet access in rural communities has long frustrated Ohio agriculture. But the dearth of rural broadband is becoming a bigger headache as internet-connected devices are increasingly employed on the state’s farms.
An experiment running at Ohio State University’s agriculture center near London, Ohio, is intended to find solutions.
Farmers are adopting more advanced technology and trying generative artificial intelligence, moving the importance of connectivity in farm country on a sharp incline, said Scott Shearer, professor of Food, Biological and Agricultural Engineering at Ohio State.
“Connectivity is one of the things that we’re lacking in the state of Ohio,” he said.
But Ohio is trying to change that. With hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants, the state plans to bring high-speed internet to hundreds of thousands of people in the coming years, which makes it crucial to understand what kind of connectivity they need, Shearer said.
That’s why the university recently unveiled a partnership with the Texas-based company Emergent Connext.
With Emergent’s help, the university installed several broadband sensors at the Molly Caren Agriculture Center, a sprawling research facility in Madison County that’s roughly a 30-minute drive from downtown Columbus.
“Today we’ve deployed our wireless network to cover Molly Caren,” Emergent Vice President of Partnerships Andrew Gardner said in an early September interview.
“We’ve got a weather station up and running, and we’re looking to have more devices connected next week in advance of the Farm Science Review,” he added, referring to an annual gathering in late September that brings thousands of people who work in agriculture to central Ohio.
The experiment
Rural communities that want broadband access face a choice. They can have high-speed internet access with a radius of about a mile and a half, or lower-speed access with a radius of nearly 12 miles.
“There is something called a LoRaWAN wireless network that is especially good for covering wide areas,” Gardner said.
That’s an enticing prospect to farmers with sprawling fields of corn and soybeans. The trade-off is that it lags behind networks that cover smaller areas, Shearer said.
The collaboration with Emergent should help determine what kind of technology works best with which kind of Internet access.
“We tend to say that you don’t need to drive tacks with a sledgehammer,” Shearer said. “It’s the right tool for the right situation.”
Specifically, researchers at Ohio State are testing the LoRaWAN wireless network in an ongoing experiment to determine when to best employ that type of connection.
Researchers already have some idea of which kind of technology works with both kinds of broadband. Self-driving tractors or automated drones, which may need to start and stop on a dime, need faster internet access. But slower access will do if a farmer simply wants to check the weather or share pictures.
“If we begin looking at animal health, we don’t need that every tenth of a second,” Shearer said.
Reshaping ag
The research underway in Madison County is vital as farmers start to fill their barns and crop fields with space-age gadgets, some of which seem to come straight out of science fiction movies.
For example, roughly 23% of farmers used generative artificial intelligence in 2026, according to a recent report from the consulting firm McKinsey.
Generative AI systems help growers manage their fields and ranchers manage their livestock. But drones are also deployed to apply fertilizer and herbicides and robots can pick weeds.
“Automation and artificial intelligence are going to reshape agriculture,” Shearer said.
Ohio State officials hope their research gives them an idea of what kind of connection they need beforehand.
