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Farmer uses Internet to Monitor Manure

By Allan Dawson
FIW Staff

September 25, 2003

Near St. Malo — When Lorne Wiebe fertilizes his land with hog manure, he keeps a close watch on the manure applicator he’s pulling, even though he doesn’t have to twist his neck to look behind.

He also has an eye on the pump, several thousand feet away, pushing the manure through a pipeline from the storage pond to the applicator.

How can he be in both places at once?
It’s easy if you have cameras, radio transmitters and high speed Internet connected to your lap top computer in your tractor.

Wiebe has a camera on the bank of his manure storage pond. It sends a signal to an antenna on a tower high above his home. He can call up what that camera sees, plus images from other cameras around the farm, including one on his tractor pointed backwards to view the equipment he’s pulling.

“Probably the biggest part of it (getting the system) was security,” Wiebe said. Not only can he see what’s happening around the farm from his laptop in the tractor or in his truck or from his of?ce, but he can also monitor barn temperatures, and water pressure. And he could do the same things via the Internet from a hotel room in Costa Rica or anywhere else served by the worldwide web.

“By installing the camera on the lagoon bank it enables me to see what’s happening on the lagoon,” Wiebe explains during an interview. “I can see it from the inside of the tractor. If anything goes wrong with the equipment I have the capability with an FM band (radio) to either turn the pump off or I can radio one of my workers to give me assistance if there is a problem.”

Originally, Wiebe wanted high speed Internet to check hog prices in the United States, where he sells his ISO wean pigs and to monitor ?uctuations in the Canadian dollar. Thanks to a radio system, he can access the Internet from anywhere on his farm, without a phone line. Wiebe’s Internet service is supplied by Rat River Communications Co-op Inc. (RRCC), which serves St. Pierre-Jolys, St. Malo and Grunthal in southeast, Manitoba.

Created in July 2002, RRCC was formed like most other co-ops — to provide a service traditional companies wouldn’t or couldn’t do, says Martin Keding, a RRCC director, and computer consultant with Rat River Technologies.

“We wanted a co-op speci?cally because we wanted to have it locally owned, locally controlled and provide jobs to local people as well,” Keding says. “And service is very important to people.” Dial-up Internet service is available in the region, but not high speed and it’s unlikely MTS (Manitoba Telcom Services) will soon provide it because of the high infrastructure cost.

The local school board, hospitals, municipalities and interested citizens came together and realized a wireless service could work and be affordable. So far RRCC has placed transmitters in towers in St. Pierre, St. Malo and Grunthal, serving people located within a 16-kilometre radius of each tower.

Signals are then transferred to Manitoba Hydro’s ?bre optic line in Steinbach, which then transfers the information to an Internet connection in Winnipeg. Hydro has excess capacity and RRCC and its members are making use of it. RRCC, which started rolling out its service in November 2002, has around 70 members, but expects to sign up a lot more.

“The interest has just gone up astronomically,” Keding says. “We are expanding in eastern Manitoba where we can, but as a co-op our ?rst priority was local service and we have always maintained that we want this to be a model that can be used by other communities. As a co-op we’re trying to make a living at it Internetobviously, but it’s not a corporation trying to dominate or be a monopoly by any means.”

RRCC’s service costs about the same as in Winnipeg, however, there’s an extra one-time cost for wireless equipment that can run around $300. The co-op has been getting calls from all over the world about the RRCC model, Keding says. The federal government, which has a program to assist communities to get high speed Internet, features RRCC on its website. The irony is RRCC can’t get any funding because the project began before the federal program was available.

High speed Internet is critical to rural development, Keding says, and RRCC’s service is already having a noticeable affect. “What it’s done is level the playing ?eld for a lot of people, especially for business,” he says. “We’ve had companies that have had to drive to Winnipeg to do business because they couldn’t get on to a service that was fast enough for them to do stuff. We’ve also had people who work at home a couple days a week. People make decisions on where they are going live based on whether they can get Internet access.”

As for Wiebe, he says the service is great, even on the tractor. “It has been actually very stable,” he says. “I’m actually on line all the time because of the package I have. I pay by the month, not by the time, so once the Internet is accessed it stays on.”

Article writen by Allan Dawson and posted in the Farmers' Independent Weekly

Mise à jour: 2004-02-12

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