Stay Informed

While Indiana Farm Bureau continues to advocate for improved broadband at the Statehouse and throughout Indiana, members and staff are becoming more active at the local level.

“Indiana Farm Bureau members regularly step up, showing how our grassroots can engage to make a difference,” said Katrina Hall, INFB senior director of policy strategy and advocacy. “Pushing for better broadband service is no exception.”

Since state and federal funding have added new opportunities, much of the activity has come from county Farm Bureaus and INFB regional managers, Hall added.

County Farm Bureau members were asked to find out if their county has a broadband task force and to become involved, Hall said. Overall, 46 counties have established such a task force, according to Indiana Broadband, an initiative to promote broadband that’s housed within the Office of Lt. Gov. Suzanne Crouch.

INFB also suggested that counties get involved in community efforts to become a “Certified Broadband-Ready Community,” another program coordinated by Indiana Broadband. A broadband-ready community is one that has established an approved broadband deployment procedure. So far, 54 cities, towns and counties have been certified.

Rush County Farm Bureau has been actively promoting broadband for a couple of years, said Virgil Bremer, Rush County Farm Bureau president. The county has an established broadband task force, is broadband-ready and it conducted its own speed test even before the INFB statewide speed test was launched.

“The speed tests say we’re struggling,” Bremer said. He is part of a committee that is looking at proposals to upgrade the county’s internet capabilities. The committee will then make a recommendation to the county commissioners.

“If you’re not involved yet in your county, you need to get involved now to help drive the discussion,” he added.

Other activities that counties have been involved in include:

• Meeting with their local officials. INFB field development specialist Wayne Belden, who represents several counties in northern Indiana, said his counties have been actively seeking opportunities to meet with county officials and to begin the process of becoming a broadband-ready county.

  Talking directly to legislators is still important, Belden said.

  “They still need information that explains that we need it, and why we need it,” he added.

• Becoming involved in county-wide broadband initiatives. INFB regional manager Justin Dahm, who represents counties in northwestern Indiana, said all his counties consider broadband to be a high priority issue. However, it hasn’t always been easy to get county officials excited about the possibilities. A new opportunity has opened up in Pulaski County, which is planning to hold a meeting to discuss a broadband initiative sometime in December, and Farm Bureau will be there, Dahm said.
• Staying involved in general economic development initiatives. While such initiatives aren’t focused exclusively on broadband, “We can’t attract businesses without it,” Dahm said.
• Promoting the speed test. Regional manager Leslie Hickman, who works with counties in north central Indiana, said her counties have been circulating “broadband business cards,” which display a little bit of information about the speed test as well as a QR code to make it easier to take the test from a phone. So far, the counties have focused on ag, banks and other places of importance in their communities, but they aren’t going to stop there.

“We want to get those cards into the schools,” she explained.

This will widen rural participation in the Indiana Speed Test. By testing their broadband service at home or reporting they have no service, students can help themselves and get data in the hands of those planning projects, Hall added.

The Indiana Speed Test is a crowd-sourced internet speed test that provides real-time internet speed data that pinpoints areas that are most in need of reliable, affordable access to broadband service. It can be performed multiple times on any device that has an internet or cellular connection. It’s available at www.infb.org/speedtest. A map of the results so far is available at the same link.