I was reading an article Africa: the Mobiles vs PCs Debate when it occurred to me not every mobile phone is an iphone. Coming from the experience of developing farmfoody.org, a social network devoted to independent agriculture, I recognized the power of mobile phones. I have had many discussions about mobile phones with farmfoody.org co-founder Tom Davenport about how to integrate mobile technology into the site.

Right now, the users of iphones and Android phones is an extremely limited group of well to do users, mostly young, who do not frequent farm stands as much as people without sophisticated phones with broadband connections. We are not at the point where most people watch video on their mobile phone, let alone look for local farms with one. A few, yes, we have seen them in our logs and try to provide a mobile reformatting of our site. We hope to accommodate mobile users more in the future.

The mobile web is bound to become an essential part of producers and consumers as they engage in and interact with agriculture. Even the practice of agriculture will be shaped by the mobile phone and ubiquitous computing and communication it enables.

Text message autoresponders could do a lot to help in developing countries to disseminate agricultural information. The biggest problem now in agriculture, at least for independent farms, is a frozen flow of information.

In the developing world it makes no sense to construct large wired telephone networks. Around here, in rural areas, I know farmers who have been told by the phone company they will never fix their aging copper wires, because wireless is the future and the maintenance costs are not worth the revenue. It is more cost effective, requires less capital and maintenance expense.

One cell site replaces thousands of miles of wire and poles or digging. We ditched our land line this year, partly because it was not repaired to our satisfaction, and we live in the “city” one of the wealthiest places in the world. Countries that do not have an existing wired telephone system are going to put in place wireless telephone networks. It makes sense that information will flow to and within the developing world over wireless networks.

The cell phone is already popular in developing countries. It is there. It is the main connection to people and information in the developing world. One has to consider that historians say the introduction of the telephone caused an unprecedented economic boom in the United States through efficiency and communication. The access and sophisticated phones will come to the developing areas of the world in a very short time.

The major players in the cell phone and online technology area have already made it clear they envision a future of ubiquitous mobile computing for everyone and are willing to push the price of phones and services down to where that is possible. Naturally, Google and the mobile phone industry are not doing this out of charity, but see it as a way to market products and services to billions of consumers. The bottom line is the web must and will be brought to everyone, everywhere, for companies to continue to grow and for information to reach rural areas of the world.

Deeplocal is a company that develops text messaging solutions for providing various kinds of information, such as Bus Stop, which provides bus schedules and other information at bus stops. What if they provided agricultural extension information to the developing world? It shows you don’t need high bandwidth, high touch mobile phones to get useful information to farmers.