The Task Force’s charge is to provide advice and recommendations to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) on how to assess and advance the deployment of broadband internet access service on unserved and underserved agricultural land and promote Precision Agriculture for both cropping and husbandry. [...] The FCC, in partnership with USDA, should adopt a framework to determine and map unserved, also called negative space, and underserved agricultural lands and develop a visualization platform hosted by NASS to display the connectivity map over a base layer of cropland and pastureland data, with necessary funding, to support the broadband mapping needs of the agricultural community. [...] Recommendations and Considerations From the information collected and discussed, the working group respectfully submit the following recommendations to the chair of the task force. These recommendations were developed to address the variety of data sets across federal agencies including the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA),. [...] The inclusion of language in the 2023 Farm Bill to authorize sufficient funds to USDA-NASS to collect and analyze a more comprehensive set of broadband coverage and usage data by increasing the granularity of data reporting from the state to county level via the Farm Computer Usage and Ownership Survey. [...] Achieving broadband speeds to the last acre must factor in the unique challenge of the land, size of the farm, economics of deployment and needs of the farmer.
- Pages
- 86
- Published in
- United States of America
