Farmers reeling from the shock of the latest outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease are being encouraged to log on to the web for emotional and practical support.
Dedicated agricultural sites are offering up-to-the minute news alerts as well as opportunities for farmers to email any concerns directly to vets across the country.
FOL Networks, which runs online discussion forums for farmers in the livestock industry, says the net can help contain a crisis, particularly when a disease first breaks out in a local rural area. The organisation's marketing manager, John Swaby, explains: "When there was an outbreak of BSE, a forum was set up quickly. Farmers were able to talk about it with each other and they gained a lot of support and information."
Despite the latest hammer blow of foot-and-mouth disease, there are signs that UK farmers are increasingly turning to the web in the hope that new online services could generate long-term improvements for their crisis-ridden industry. Struggling farmers are now being offered everything from up-to-date sheep market reports accessible over WAP phones to sites providing cheap deals on second-hand machinery such as tractors and combine harvesters.
FOL Networks runs Farming Online, which gives UK farmers detailed weather forecasts so they can improve yields by applying fertiliser at the right time. On the site, farmers can also access the latest prices for wheat, barley, oats and potatoes.
And in a further move to help the depressed industry, FOL has set up an electronic trading exchange for milk quotas, which lets farmers efficiently buy and sell litres of milk without paying commissions to traditional brokers.
Swaby says the web's increasing ability to deliver fast price information means that struggling UK farmers will be better placed in the long term to make more profitable decisions. "Imagine you have a load of grain in your silos waiting to be sold. A farmer can sell that at any time. If he reads on a site that the grain price has never been so high, he might decide to go with that. It helps in everyday decision-making during the period they are hoping to sell."
The latest crop of supportive online farming services are not solely about information-sharing and community building. Farmec is now running an innovative online European marketplace for new and second-hand agricultural machinery. Equipment is independently inspected before it goes on to the site.
Paul Bassett, Farmec's chief executive, says UK farmers can now go online and access cheaper second-hand machinery from the continent. He explains that tractors bought from farms in Europe are often in a better condition than their UK counterparts because of different farming practices and climates.
"In the UK we tend to buy big tractors and work the guts out of them. In countries such as Holland and Belgium they do not necessarily work their tractors as hard as we do. Our weather conditions are also a lot worse than they are, for example, in France and Italy."
Later this year, First4Farming is planning to launch an electronic marketplace for agricultural suppli ers, distributors and manufacturers so they can trade quicker and more efficiently in feeds, fertilisers and chemicals. All the traditional paperwork such as invoicing will be done online. Nick Evans, First4Farming's managing director, says the e-marketplace will be followed up early next year with a portal dedicated to farmers.
On the site, farmers will have personal accounts so they can check their orders of grain and arrange deliveries to be made to their farms. "The internet in itself will not improve the world price of grain, which is governed by many other factors. It is about removing the time-consuming costs and enabling farmers to run their businesses better," Evans explains.
Despite these positive online initiatives, there are plenty of sites on the web that reflect the depressed nature of the UK farming industry. Many farmers are literally in despair about how to make a living after being subjected to a barrage of crises they feel unable to control.
Sites such as Farming Help, offer links to online rural crisis networks that offer emotional help to farmers who, in some extreme cases, have been driven to the verge of suicide as they do not know how they will support their families.
Stephen Howe, the editor of Farmers' Weekly, says the crisis gripping UK farming is one of the reasons farmers are showing signs of being more responsive to the new solutions offered by the internet. "Everyone is concerned about profit margins. Margins are very tight or non-existent in most cases. Farmers will get involved with anything that could improve the situation."
Howe says support for the internet is across the board and not just restricted to younger farmers. Web-based services not only help with record-keeping, he explains, but farmers can comply online with government directives by, for example, submitting electronic statements reporting the movements of cattle.
However, e-commerce for the agricultural industry is still very much in its infancy and Howe feels there are still a lot of big questions to be answered about how quickly it will take off and whether the entrepreneurs driving the changes willbe able to make a sizeable return on their new dot.com ventures.
It's not just entrepreneurs who are eventually hoping to reap big profits from agricultural sites, farmers themselves are also getting involved. There are three farmers behind Sheepsmart, which provides sheep market prices in real time. Simon Barnes, who owns a 365-acre organic farm, north of Dumfries in Scotland, says he volunteered to help with the site because of the shortage of easily accessible market information. "We're nosey sods and we like to know what price our neighbours sold their sheep at," he jokes.
But he knows the online service is already influencing farmers' decisions. "If it was a disaster on Monday you might think twice about taking your sheep to the market on Tuesday."
Barnes has just launched a Wap phone-based service that relays sheep prices to farmers. The new service is called Sheepsmart mobile and Barnes anticipates it could help put pressure on buyers to pay the best market rates. The Wap service lets farmers see what trades are being done at other markets while they are at ringside.
With fully-fledged e-commerce yet to take off, Barnes believes that the web's biggest contribution so far has been to help cash-strapped farmers diversify by enabling them to promote farm shops and accommodation facilities. He runs a bed-and-breakfast service which, he says, has taken off since he set up his web site at www.borelandfarm.co.uk.
But with such a large farm to manage, when does he get the time to log on to the net? "I use it between 11 at night and two in the morning," he explains. "I'm not a great sleeper. The beauty of it is that it can be accessed 24 hours a day."
Although the Countryside Alliance has postponed its march on London until at least early May, passions are still running high. In the wake of the BSE crisis and the latest potentially crippling outbreak, farmers are fighting for their self-respect and survival. Once this crisis subsides, the web, with its tantalising promises of greater long-term efficiencies, is likely to continue to pick up support.
"The future for farmers is not to tighten their belts," argues Farmec's Paul Bassett. "They have to come into the new technology."
