Farmer Vladimir Meets the Web

By Bill Fick

An unexpected office visit by an unusual "client" this week, a farmer from the Smolenskaya region, provided a remarkable example of Internet awareness and its potential relevance to a broad section of the population here, despite the obvious remoteness of "cyberspace" to Russia's struggling regions.

Vladimir Ivanovich, we learned, grows sunflower and oil seeds. The most difficult part of harvesting his crops and producing vegetable oils to sell is removing the seed shells, a process called "hulling". He knew that U.S. and European companies build highly effective machines which separate seed meats and husks in industrial quantities, and wanted to locate a manufacturer for eventual purchase and import.

I don't think Vladimir Ivanovich had ever used a computer, but somehow, he had heard about the Internet and found his way to us, convinced that we could help him locate the device he needed. While such information retrieval is not really our business, we could hardly refuse, and after an hour of searches hampered by struggles with Russian/English "hulling" vocabulary, my partner found the homepage of the Minnesota-based Forsberg (http://www.forsbergs.com) corporation, "Leaders in Separation Technology" and manufacturers of relevant machines since 1932.

Vladimir Ivanovich decided that the Model 15-D Impact Huller was right for him, and after a quick run to a kiosk to buy us a box of candy, he left with a detailed printout of technical specifications and full contact information for Forsberg.

While on-line shopping for agricultural equipment is probably a rather rare event in Russia, American farmers have been adapting the newest technologies to their daily work for years. The Tennessee Valley Authority, which helped bring electricity to rural communities during the Great Depression, is at the forefront of helping farmers to use the Internet today. TVA maintains an encyclopedic agricultural resource called Rural Studies home page (http://www.rural.org) and publishes a popular book called "The Farmer's Guide to the Internet."

A particularly vibrant virtual community has formed around Farm Journal magazine's website (http://www.farmjournal.com), which provides weather and market information and discussion groups on issues from veterinary medicine to grain elevators in addition to the contents of the print magazine. Internet-savvy small farmers argue that the net has leveled the field for them in an era of massive corporate and factory farming, providing instant access to information and "community" support and advice. A specialized ranch such as the Shiloh Creek Farm (http://www.leanbeef.com) can market its bull semen and cattle embryos nationwide on the web, while big companies such as Monsanto and John Deere provide assistance to even their smallest customers by e-mail.

For obvious reasons, Russia lacks grassroots cyber interaction among its farmers, although a number of agricultural web resources have appeared. The Food and Agriculture Ministry has a website at http://www.aris.ru, which includes up-to-date government information such as the July 3 change in milk taxes, as well as commodity price information and links to other resources. Moscow State University's Soil Science Faculty contains information in English for the more academically-minded, and has also provided server space for a large collection of Russian language documents related to the International Finance Corporation's regional land reform and farm privatization programs (http://soil.msu.ru/~land).

Attempts to grow on-line agricultural commodities trade have also taken root. A company called Saratov Seed, for example, has created an on-line grain trading system (http://www.seedsnet.ru) which aims to provide price data and deal clearing for all of Russia.

My aim, however, is not a comprehensive survey of net farming in Russia. The point is rather that literally everybody, even farmer Vladimir Ivanovich from the Smolenskaya region, can reap great benefit from access to the Internet, or at least access to people who can conduct Internet research for them. The question is how best to foster that access across Russia's great expanse given that the denizens of Russia's economically struggling regional cities and towns can hardly expect to afford computers and $2/hour for Internet access; nor can they likely acquire the skills to use them, any time soon.

In the United States, local public libraries, more than 2,500 of which were created early in the century from the philanthropy of Andrew Carnegie, have traditionally served as a central mechanism to provide improved information access to the masses, both by loaning books and simply providing friendly staff - librarians -- who can help visitors to answer questions and retrieve information. Recognizing that libraries are ideally suited to continue this role into the 21^st Century, Microsoft's Bill Gates last week established a $400 million foundation to provide Internet access to communities through libraries in America's most information-starved locales.

Local libraries can also be part of the answer for Russia, although to reach more of Vladimir Ivanovich's colleagues, more creative venues must also be found.