Farming is about information and predicting trends. While the title of this piece makes a play on farmers talking about the weather, no factor is as important as accurate weather prediction in farming…and the internet means that farmers can literally get up to the minute forecasts on local conditions that concern them.
Likewise, farming has grown, as the efficiency of modern agriculture has increased, into an increasingly isolated profession. No longer do you have a farm run by an extended family and farm hands, it's often a small family who put in long hours on a gigantic spread. It's a business, and needs to be treated as such, but that isolation can take its toll. To combat it, more farmers have taken to communicating with each other on the internet, both for socialization and organizing feed runs, as well as the more conventional entertainments to be had. In particular, the internet has allowed the farm community to re-knit it self as a social institution, and allows family-run farms to collaborate and compete with vertically integrated agribusiness, and keep track of local resource cycling and depletion.
The internet is about information exchange, and the wealth of information on the internet is downright daunting. Sites range from online comparisons of futures pricing for agricultural products, to comparisons of soil composition over time, to aquifer levels for irrigation projects. Beyond production issues, there's also information on farming regulations and tax code changes, marketing and trade information, and tips on spotting new trends in the farming industry, like biofuels and soybean oils.
Information exchange isn't just a one way street. A lot of farmers are getting use out interactive sites, like blogs and message boards. Most of them consolidate information from several sources and post results, and allow people to post comments and testimonials about what works and doesn't work. This allows a farmer to filter what he's reading to find only the information pertinent to their operation. Even the major farming journals, like Agriculture Online and AgriBusiness, and New Farmer, have moved to online presentations for interactive content and information dissemination. In a lot of ways, what the interactivity of the internet has done is allowed the age-old farming tradition of talking things out with others to renew itself in the 21st century..
From the founding of the country, when 92% of the people were farmers, to the modern era, where 1.5% of the people in the country work in agriculture, America has undergone amazing demographic shifts. (Indeed, the McCormick Reaper was probable as instrumental for the North winning the Civil War as any weapon developed during that era, as it allowed three times as many people to leave the farms to join the regiments as the South could afford.) Fewer than 10% of the American population lives in rural areas, and America is the leading agricultural producer in the world. However, because the rural population is so small, internet access and broadband penetration lags in the agricultural sector. In part, the issue is cost. Because Universal Access Charges don't exist for internet access, there's no subsidy that forces telecommunications companies to roll cable and fiber optic out to rural areas. When the telephone infrastructure in this country was set up in the 1910s and 1920s, more than half the population was in the agricultural sector, and there as a lot more pressure to roll out universal services.
While some progress is being made, most farm access to broadband internet is expensive, slow and unreliable – more than 2/3 of farms that have internet access use dialup for their connection rather than DSL or cable. The USDA's biennial report on Farm Computer Usage and ownership is due out later this summer, but if current trend lines continue, farm internet usage will lag behind urban areas by no small amount.
While the encroachment of the Internet has provided a lot of community access and information to the agricultural community, it hasn't replaced the importance of just getting together with fellow farmers who till the same soil, work the same hours, and deal with the same weather, day in and day out, particularly when dealing with the same feed suppliers and sales reps and markets.
There will always be a need for a farming community, and it'll encompass all the means of communication society makes available.
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Farming is an activity that's as old as civilization; indeed some cite the rise of agriculture as the starting point of human civilization. For hundred of years it was America’s leading industry. And while the last century and a half have provided more innovations in farming and agriculture than any of the previous 8,000 years of recorded history combined, we're on the verge of a revolution in agriculture and farming that stands fit to dwarf any that have come before. 
