Make way for the ‘agrinet’

Call them what you will. The dot.farms. The agrinet. The dot.commodities.

Internet companies devoted to agriculture are sprouting up rapidly, with Northern Colorado emerging as fertile ground for the latest wave of e-commerce.

These companies il-lustrate how pervasive the Internet has become in our society, as it takes root in the second-oldest profession, agriculture. It’s an industry that has become increasingly high-tech over the years.

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As Business Report special sections editor Sonja Bisbee Wulff reported in a recent article, some of the most-promising agricultural Internet companies are based in Fort Collins and Greeley.

Greeley-based Agtown.com provides users with links to services such as tractor repair and drought-resistant seeds.

Cybercrop.com of Fort Collins links buyers and sellers of grain, thereby becoming an online venue for commodities trading.

VantagePoint Network of Fort Collins, a joint venture of Deere & Co., Farmland Industries and Growmark Inc., recently launched vantagepoint.com, which provides a variety of crop-management services online, in addition to links to agricultural services and data.

mPower3 Inc. of Greeley integrates agricultural databases for Internet delivery.

Yet another company, Limelight Technologies of Davenport, Iowa, is an Internet-based development company that creates Web-based applications of databases, among other services. The company is rapidly expanding its Fort Collins operation.

Sellmeats.com, a Missouri-based company, recently acquired Precision Access Co. of Greeley. Sellmeats.com operates a Web site for buying or selling raw or processed meats, while Precision Access provides software that facilitates inventory control for the meat industry.

These companies seem to be sprouting right here in Northern Colorado in part because of the happy convergence of agribusiness and high technology that we enjoy along the Front Range. While many might describe Northern Colorado as two economies — one focused on ag, the other on high tech 9 the truth is that these industries are growing together.

The Internet, along with incredible advances in geographic information systems, cell sorting, livestock identification and other fields, has brought science and agriculture closer.

Non-Internet names such as Red Hen Systems, XY Inc., Optibrand and others will become increasingly known. These high-tech companies advance not only the cause of science but also farming itself.

The Internet, meanwhile, continues to revolutionize our society. It will help make agriculture more efficient, allowing farmers to better prepare soil, grow crops and sell commodities. It is rapidly affecting how farmers do businesses, no longer limiting them to the nearest grain elevator.

It’s perhaps one of the most-gratifying aspects of the emergence of the World Wide Web, that the most “geeky” of societal trends can have such a profound impact on the way food finds its way to our tables.

More advancements will come, and a lot of them will come from right here in Fort Collins and Greeley.