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MARTINSVILLE, Ohio — Tucked away in the den of his 127-year-old farmhouse, Ed Winkle huddles over his computer. The screen’s soft glow lights up his eyeglasses, reflecting messages about tractors, corn hybrids and crop insurance.

Winkle is checking the latest postings on his favorite Internet farm forum. Advice from fellow farmers around the country has enabled him to increase his corn and soybean production, better market his crops, learn how to rebuild engines and get good tires for his tractor.

Online message boards and chat rooms are replacing rural coffee shops and feed mills as places for farmers to talk farming and trade tips as more of rural America goes online.

“You get the best thinkers in agriculture,” Winkle said of the forums. “You’re mixing such a diverse group of people — from different areas, from different backgrounds, different experiences, different ways of farming.”

Fifty-one percent of U.S. farms have Internet access, according to a July 2005 report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, up from 48 percent in 2003. More than two-thirds of them still use dial-up modems.

The popularity of online farm forums has grown as well, said Mack Strickland, an agricultural engineer at Purdue University. Some forums claim to have as many as 30,000 registered users.

Enthusiasts say the forums have improved farm production and saved farmers precious dollars by helping them avoid costly mistakes in planting, fertilizing, equipment buys and maintenance. And forums have enabled farmers — many of them miles from their nearest neighbor — to educate one another and build community.

“We all like to talk to folks like ourselves who have the same problems,” said Stan Ernst, a marketing instructor at Ohio State University’s department of agricultural economics. “We have so much riding on many of our decisions economically that you’ve got to find people with experience.”

“It’s enough time to have a cup of coffee and a conversation and learn something,” he said. “It’s just rearranged who their neighbors are, in a sense. You can’t help but think that has changed farming to some degree.”

Rural America has lagged behind the cities in Internet usage, especially broadband, because wiring the population-rich cities is more profitable, and wiring the countryside more expensive due to long distances and natural barriers.

Now, farmers and existing rural businesses are becoming more reliant on the Internet to be competitive, and rural communities are becoming more aggressive in seeking Internet access. They see it as a way to attract white-collar jobs, and urban dwellers who have moved to the country are demanding it.

Paul Butler, who grows corn and soybeans on 260 acres in Macon, Ill., returned to farming four years ago after 25 years in the computer business. He doubts he would have made it without online advice from fellow farmers.

“I would have made a lot of expensive mistakes,” said Butler, 39, who has a broadband connection. “Purchasing seed is a pretty complicated decision. It was nice to have 20 unbiased people that weren’t selling seed that could give me an opinion on it.”

Farmers have to decide themselves whether the advice they get is sound. Agriculture.com’s Walter said he tries to screen out the hokum, blow- hards and occasional shyster. Purdue’s Strickland said some users give opinions not based on fact or research.

Although he seldom posts a question, Neer, who works for a farm equipment manufacturer, devours the information he sees on precision farming, using the forums to shop for equipment.

and information about tractors and combines that are steered by computers linked to global positioning satellites.

Machinery, the universal language of farmers, is a hot topic in farm forums. So is when the best time is to take crops to market for the best price. Sometimes the talk veers away from pure farming.

In a recent exchange, an Illinois farmer complained that the starter in his pickup truck was acting up. A fellow farmer replied that the electric solenoid atop the starter was probably worn out and the contact sticking in the closed position.

“I would put a whole new starter on it,” he wrote. “Fix it now before it ruins the flywheel teeth.”

Cheryl Flannery is the director of information-technology security, compliance and risk management at Air Products and Chemicals, the $8 billion chemical and gas supplier. Her responsibilities cover everything from information-technology security strategy, to policies and practices, to overseeing electronic and forensic investigations.

Flannery also serves on the Chemical Sector Cyber Security Program Steering Team, a group set up by the Chemical Information Technology Council (ChemITC)—an organization of chemical companies that addresses common technology issues—to drive cybersecurity practices and guidelines across the industry. She talked last month with Baseline editor-in-chief John McCormick.

Q: How does the Chemical Sector Cyber Security Program look at the issue of cybersecurity?

A: The way we look at information security and cybersecurity, because of the industries we’re in, is really twofold. There’s the traditional information-technology side, which deals with all your traditional business systems. The other aspect is the manufacturing and control systems—we do have many systems that control the operations of our plants.

So that is one thing that is different from, say, financial services. They don’t have that other half of actually controllin manufacturing and operations.

We are very similar to other industries in our concerns around viruses and worms and malicious software—certainly the continued, growing threat of identity theft and malicious code. We’re concerned about the loss of intellectual property. So we have many of these same concerns.

But we also are concerned about a blended attack, where a hacker could try to break in and [then] cause harm—physical harm—to one of our facilities and have a physical outcome, not just a business systems outcome.

Q: How would one of these blended attacks happen?

A: Over the past seven [or] eight years, in order to gain efficiencies, those systems [were built] to allow support from really anywhere across the company. You don’t have to physically be at a location. They were connected to the traditional business network. It did open up more vulnerabilities.

So a lot of the effort over the past few years has been [on] how we can better protect these systems and actually add some layers of protection in between the normal business-systems network and the manufacturing-and-control systems networks.

Q: How do you go about protecting them?

A: One of the things that a number of companies have done is [put in basically] a firewall—another layer of protection—between the business system network and the process control network.

Q: What else?

A: A second thing we’ve done is to work with the process control vendors and industrial automation vendors to better protect their software and add some other security features.

Another simple thing that we’ve from a policy and architecture perspective is to say that the sole purpose of those computers [running the plant] should be to run the plant. They should not be general-purpose computers that can read e-mail or surf the Internet.

Even though they are on the network, you can set them up to not allow them to have browser access.

Q: You mentioned working with the vendors to get them to build in more security to their products, but with the type of systems used in chemical plants, that presents its own challenges, doesn’t it?

A: If you look at the operations of a chemical plant, you may have a plant that is running for years and years without a shutdown. And many of these systems are operational for 20 to 25 years. So many companies don’t want to spend the money to upgrade to a newer system.

Q: I haven’t heard of any major incidents in which a chemical plant manufacturing system was compromised. Does that make it tougher to convince people to maintain a level of urgency?

A: One of the biggest preventative techniques you can use is awareness education. What we’ve done in the chemical sector program, as well as within many of our chemical companies, is provide some awareness of different incidents that have happened. We’ll go back to incidents that actually happened in other industries that use automated systems.

So, for example, when the Slammer [worm] hit back in 2003, there was actually an [infection] at a nuclear power plant. There was also [an incident] back in 2001 where a hacker got into [the systems for] the port in Houston. I think people are surprised that incidents can happen and that they do happen.

FROM THE 1940S through the ’70s, the major telegraph companies voluntarily gave the government copies of all cables sent to or from the U.S. as part of an illegal project caned Operation Shamrock. According to “The Surveillance-Industrial Complex,” a new report from the American Civil Liberties Union, something similar is afoot today.

More and more, Washington is using private-sector intermediaries to circumvent the Fourth Amendment’s restrictions on the information its agents can directly gather. While public opposition killed the Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS), which would have recruited private citizens to be the government’s eyes and ears, a plethora of smaller programs are attempting the same thing with neighborhood watch groups, real estate agents, truck drivers, and others.

Other laws require businesses to maintain records on their customers for the benefit of law enforcement, exploiting a legal loophole that recognizes no Fourth Amendment interest in the information individuals have turned over to third parties. Last year the FBI used “national security letters” to gather information on some 270,000 Americans from Las Vegas hotels and ear rental agencies, all without any individualized suspicion of wrongdoing. And even those demands are increasingly unnecessary: Government can just buy reams of information from…