I recently saw a presentation that showed how food safety is starting to rely on good rural broadband. I’ve already witnessed many other ways that farmers use broadband like precision farming, herd monitoring, and drone surveillance, but food safety was a new concept for me.

The presentation centered around the romaine lettuce scare of a few months ago. The food industry was unable to quickly identify the source of the contaminated produce and the result was a recall of all romaine nationwide. It turns out the problem came from one farm in California with E. Coli contamination, bur farmers everywhere paid a steep price as all romaine was yanked from store shelves and restaurants, also resulting in cancellations of upcoming orders.

Parts of the food industry have already implemented the needed solution. You might have noticed that the meat industry is usually able to identify the source of problems relatively quickly and can ususally track problems back to an individual rancher or packing house. Cattle farmer are probably the most advanced at tracking the history of herd animals, but all meat producers track products to some extent.

The ideal solution to the romaine lettuce problem is to document every step of the farming process and to make that information available to retailers and eventually to consumers. In the case of romaine that might mean tracking and recording the basic facts of each crop at each farm. That would mean recording the strain of seeds used. It would mean logging the kinds of fertilizer and insecticide applied to a given field. It would mean recording the date when the romaine was picked. The packing and shipping process would then be tracked so that everything from the tracking number on the box or crate, and the dates and identity of every immediate shipper between farm to grocery store would be recorded.

Inititally this would be used to avoid the large blanket recalls like happened with romaine. Ultimately, this kind of information could be made available to consumers. We could wave our smartphone at produce and find out where it was grown, when it was picked and how long it’s been sitting in the store. There are a whole lot of steps that have to happen before the industry can reach that ultimate goal.

The process needs to start with rural broadband. The farmer needs to be able to log the needed information in the field. The day may come when robots can automatically log everything about the growing process, and that will require even more intensive and powerful broadband. The farmer today needs an easy data entry system that allows data to be scanned into the cloud as they work during the growing, harvesting, and packing process.

There also needs to be some sort of federal standards so that every farmer is collecting the same data, and in a format that can be used by every grocery store and restaurant. There is certainly a big opportunity for any company that can develop the scanners and the software involved in such a system.

In many places this can probably be handled with robust cellular data service that extends into the fields. However, there is a lot of rural America that doesn’t have decent, or even any cell service out in the fields. Any farm tracking data is also going to need adequate broadband to upload data into the cloud. Farms with good broadband are going to have a big advantage over those without. We already know this is true today for cattle and dairy farming where detailed records are kept on each animal. I’ve talked to farmers who have to drive every day to find a place to upload their data into the cloud.

In the many counties where I work today the farmers are among those leading the charge for better broadband. If selling produce or animals requires broadband we are going to see farmers move from impatience to insistence when lack of connectivity means loss of profits.

I know as a consumer that I would feel better knowing more about the produce I buy. I’d love to buy more produce that was grown locally or regionally, but it’s often nearly impossible to identify in the store. I’d feel a lot safer knowing that the batch of food I’m buying has been tracked and certified as safe. Just in the last year there’s been recalls on things like romaine, avocados, spring onions, and packaged greens mixes. I don’t understand why any politician that serves a farming district is not screaming loudly for a national solution for rural broadband.