New technologies, Twitter, reshape how farmers work and connect

New technologies, Twitter, reshape how farmers work and connect

With 75,700 farms, 800 food processing plants and roughly 1 million employees, agriculture pumps $93 billion into Ohio's economy every year. All the while, farmers are producing more variety for consumers, doing it more economically and doing it on fewer acres than ever before. How?

Waste-saving controls and satellite communications have produced combines that can "drive themselves" and tell their operators where they are in a field -- to within an inch.

Advances in biotechnology have produced hardier animals and healthier grains.

And information technology has made it possible not only to get the daily market report from a Blackberry in a strawberry field, but to share information with an extended community of farmers and consumers.

"Twenty-five or 30 years ago, we didn't have the ability through the monitor systems and sprayers. . . to really look and see exactly what (herbicides) you were putting where," says John Davis, a Delaware County corn and soybean grower and president of the Ohio Corn Growers Association. "You just kind of threw it out there and did the best you could. You've got the ability now through computers and other types of GPS products to place the product (only) where it's needed."

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