By Barry Bishop – SVP of Kinetic Field Operations
Agriculture has gone digital, and most farmers are not only familiar with technology. They’re pushing forward innovating, testing and dabbling with tools and data that are the next big leap forward. According to the USDA, guidance autosteering is on more than half of midsize crop farms and 70% of large-scale crop farms. Yield monitors, yield maps, and soil maps support 68% of large operations. Drones, soil sensors, and variable rate technology are everyday tools.
A 2025 study from the Association of Equipment Manufacturers, produced with the American Farm Bureau Federation and several commodity groups, found that current precision ag adoption accounts for a 5% boost in annual U.S. crop production, with another 6% available if adoption keeps growing.
The technology has shown solid potential. But often, what doesn’t get covered at the equipment dealership is how much of that potential depends on the internet connection back at the shop or house.
What precision ag demands of your internet
Some of these tools will limp along on a basic connection, but field data, aerial imagery, soil sampling maps, and variable rate prescriptions are files, and files have to move from one part of the world to another. A single drone flight over a few hundred acres can generate gigabytes of imagery that needs to reach the platform where it gets processed.
That means upload speed matters as much as download speed, which is where a lot of rural connections fall short. Older copper-based infrastructure is usually built lopsided, with far less capacity going out than coming in. Fiber offers symmetrical speeds, so you can upload just as fast as you can download.
But connected equipment also needs consistency. Remote diagnostics, irrigation controls, and monitoring alerts depend on a connection that holds steady, even when storms roll in or everything is competing for bandwidth at once. Fiber optics excel over copper-based connections in these situations.
One of our own local ops managers, Ben Summerlin, added GPS positioning to pivots on his operation, and it gives him instant readouts on water pressure, pivot alignment, and estimated time to finish the job. “I can’t tell you how much that’s done for our after-hours irrigation,” Ben said. “It’s not unusual for me to set an early-morning alarm just to wake up and check the numbers.”
But to do that, you need a stable connection. If you can’t count on your internet to stay up and running all night, you might wake up to an error message instead.
The truth is that there’s a huge gap between the infrastructure these tools need and the infrastructure many farmers have access to. The USDA’s 2025 technology use survey found that just 55% of U.S. farms use a broadband connection to reach the internet, while 74% get online through a cellular data plan, either as a secondary or sole option.
That means a lot of operations are running data-heavy field technology over a phone signal.
The gap between the field and the office
Data collected in the cab has to get somewhere useful.
Farm management platforms, agronomist collaboration, crop insurance documentation, dealer diagnostics, and market decisions all run through software that expects a working connection. The USDA found that half of U.S. farms now buy agricultural inputs online, an 18-point jump in just two years. The business side of farming has moved online, whether the infrastructure kept pace or not.
But when the connection is unreliable, files sit un-synced, and overnight uploads time out. An equipment alert arrives after the problem already cost you a day.
And while it doesn’t come up as much in conversation, poor connections can also hurt another piece of your operations: marketing. Most crops trade on a board that moves in real time. Prices shift throughout the season, and you need to be able to act quickly when the numbers are right. A spotty or slow connection can lead to missed opportunities that cut into profits.
In other words, even if you rarely have noticeable outages, constant dips in speed and throttled upload capacity can still quietly hurt your operations. Decisions get made based on incomplete or outdated information, over and over, across a growing season, compounding the cost of an unreliable connection.
Why does connection reliability matter as much as speed?
A basic copper connection or cell signal might look good enough on a speed test done on a sunny afternoon when nothing else is online. But that’s not reality. You need a connection that holds up consistently, through storms and during peak hours, even when multiple devices are competing for bandwidth.
Fiber works differently than older copper lines or wireless connections. It carries data as light through glass, so it doesn’t degrade over distance the way copper does, and it typically isn’t affected in the same way by weather or line-of-sight issues. It also supports symmetrical speeds, meaning uploads move as fast as downloads.
For an operation pushing field data to the cloud, fiber can make all the difference between technology that works the way it was sold and technology that mostly works on good days.
Kinetic is connecting rural farm country
Rural fiber is harder to build, which is why a lot of providers skip it. Kinetic decided to take it on instead.
Kinetic now serves 1,400 communities across 18 states, many in farm country, with up to multi-gig speeds, unlimited data, and price guarantees of up to three years. That’s why CNET recently named Kinetic the Best Rural Fiber Internet Provider for the second year running.
Get the most out of what you already bought
The equipment in the shed keeps getting smarter. The connection it depends on should keep up. Reliable fiber lets the tools you already paid for perform the way they were designed to, season after season.
To check fiber availability at your operation, visit GoKinetic.com or call 877-90-FIBER.
