American farmers are capturing one kilobyte of data per year for every seed that is planted and a typical corn field has about 32,000 plants. That means that every corn field is producing about 32 megabytes of data annually and with 450 million acres of corn in the United States, that means that farmers are already producing 14.4 million gigabytes of data related to their corn crops annually. Or, the entire Library of Congress downloaded more than 50 times.
“That’s the dilemma, that our farmers out there are collecting more data for every seed they plant than they can process,” Lescourret said. “All of them are located in rural areas, and the broadband infrastructure is not keeping up.”