Broadband’s broken promise: How federal failures and funding fights keep Native and Black farmers offline

This article was originally published by Investigate Midwest.

Kelsey Scott spotted it from her deck: a sudden lightning flash, then a flame.

Lightning storms are common in rural Eagle Butte, South Dakota. When one rolled through in July, Scott had to act fast or the blaze would sweep across the 7,200-acre cattle ranch.

But emergency response is complicated, Scott said, in this remote area of the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation. Calling 911 was a game of “phone tag” with multiple dispatch centers, one of them a Bureau of Indian Affairs fire department. And even when responders came, she knew they’d be stopping for other fires along the way. 

So Scott turned to another source for help. With 911 on speakerphone, she fired off texts to family and neighbors, who arrived to stop the blaze at only five acres of damage before emergency services arrived.

“Every minute counts, and having access to safe and reliable internet and cell phone service helps ensure that we get as many of those minutes to count as possible,” Scott said.

While Scott was able to call others for help, nearly 1,700 miles away in Boydton, Virginia, John Boyd could not. 

The 60-year-old farmer — and founder of the National Black Farmers Association — has internet coverage on only half of his 2,000 acres. In 2023, Boyd’s combine caught fire while harvesting grain, and he was in a dead zone. 

He had to walk a mile and a half just to find cellular service. By then, the fire had destroyed his combine.

“A complete loss, and insurance wouldn’t pay,” Boyd said. 

Internet access is more than a convenience for farmers and ranchers. It’s become critical infrastructure, and not only for emergency situations. Research has linked high-speed internet access to increased crop yields and reduced operational expenses, largely through precision agriculture — advanced farm technologies that leverage timely, detailed data. 

However, an analysis of census data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture exposes race-based disparities in farm internet access. 

In 2022, 79% of farms nationwide reported having internet access. Farms run by white, Asian and Pacific Islander producers met or exceeded that average. But Native-operated farms trailed at 71%, and Black-operated farms at 67%. A separate data set, which tracks ethnicity in addition to race, revealed Hispanic- or Latino-operated farms also fell short of the national average. 

For many Indigenous and Black farmers, the digital divide is stark. But even as these communities push to narrow the gap, shifting policies, industry influence and flawed federal data compound distinct connectivity challenges for each.

“You’ve got an availability crisis in some areas, you’ve got an affordability crisis with some people,” said Mignon Clyburn, former commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from 2009 to 2018. “But you also have this historic discrimination that has set the tone for a very horrible baseline.”

‘Digital redlining’ deepens the divide

For Native and Black communities, being last in line for broadband access is another chapter in a long history of exclusion. Advocates and experts call it “digital redlining.” 

Data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2021 American Community Survey reveals only 71% of Indigenous households on tribal lands had broadband subscriptions — among the lowest rates in the nation. Rates for Black households reached 86%, but still fell below the 90% national average.

On farms, the gap widens. In 2022, USDA data shows only about one in three Native- and Black-operated farms had access to broadband, compared with nearly half of white-operated farms — a rate marginally better than the national average.

At the time, the FCC defined broadband as 25/3 megabits per second, a threshold that increased to 100/20 Mbps in 2024. By the new measure, FCC data shows that the broadband gap was even wider in rural and tribal areas.

On Boyd’s farm in Virginia, home to soybeans, grain and cattle, internet infrastructure is sparse. Dead zones spot his land, rendering precision agriculture technologies inoperable.

Connected farms, Boyd said, often use tools like GPS mapping and remote sensors to streamline operations and monitor real-time conditions. But without broadband infrastructure in his area, he can’t follow suit.

“I can farm, but guess what?” Boyd said. “If you have cutting-edge technology that gives you an edge, it doesn’t matter how good a farmer I am. I’m not keeping up with you because you have a technical advantage here.”

Research confirms a link between broadband connectivity and agricultural benefits, including higher crop yields and lower costs. Farmers and experts also point to benefits like real-time market updates and online consumer outreach. 

Nearly 500 miles west of Boyd, on his farm in Lexington, Kentucky, Jim Coleman enjoys what’s known as “last-acre connectivity” — the extension of broadband access across every corner of farmland. In recent years, momentum has grown behind the last-acre movement, most recently with a House of Representatives bill in May. 

For Coleman, 100% coverage across his 13 acres means easy access to weather conditions and online repair tutorials.

“When I’m out on my tractor, if the tractor stops, I don’t have to run up to the house, get on the landline to call someone to come fix it, wait two weeks and pay $500,” Coleman said. “I can just get off the tractor, go on my phone to YouTube and type in ‘tractor stopped.’ I love the independence and the sustainability of having immediate, 24/7 access to problem-solving via the internet.”

Coleman’s great grandfather first purchased the farm in 1888 — the same land he had tilled while enslaved — and it’s remained in the family since. It wasn’t until 2020, when Coleman moved back to the land, that his farm got internet access. Stationed only six miles from Lexington’s city center, Coleman was able to leverage an existing network at a relatively low cost.

“I didn’t have to create any kind of extra infrastructure on my farm,” Coleman said. “It was easy for me to just connect.”

That’s not the case for farmers like Boyd, who want access but lack nearby infrastructure. Boyd said he’s spent years pressuring AT&T to build an affordable and reliable network in his area, but to no avail. 

It’s a common occurrence in the rural stretches of America: the high costs of deploying infrastructure throughout vast and sparsely populated areas deter even the most prosperous internet service providers. 

Tedd Buelow, who served as the USDA’s tribal relations team lead for nearly two decades — from 2006 to last March — said he doesn’t fault telecommunications companies for being “fiscally conservative” in rural areas. 

“But that doesn’t mean the person that’s not being serviced, who’s in a tribal area, who’s ethnically different, isn’t going to feel like they were discriminated against,” Buelow said.

In addition to controlling infrastructure buildout, internet service providers (ISPs) wield immense influence over federal policy.

An analysis of OpenSecrets data shows that from 2019 through July of this year, 10 major ISPs and trade associations spent more than $611 million lobbying on telecommunications issues, including internet-related legislation. 

Investigate Midwest reached out to each of these companies and trade groups about their lobbying expenditures, and most did not respond to a request for comment. Two that did respond offered statements but declined to provide specifics on their lobbying efforts. 

Charter Communications, which offers internet services under the Spectrum brand, spent more than $69 million on telecommunications lobbying across six years. Kim Ripp, Charter’s vice president of communications, said in a statement that Charter remains committed to rural expansion through a multi-year deployment initiative backed by “more than $7 billion in private investment.” 

A spokesperson for the trade group USTelecom said in a statement that its 112 member companies, including AT&T and Verizon, have long promoted “connectivity for all,” including rural Americans.

Deployment disparities aren’t the only crises fueling the digital divide. Even when infrastructure reaches rural areas, farmers often can’t afford to connect their land — much less every acre.

Research found that in 2022, farmworkers collectively earned 40% less than comparable non-agricultural workers. Agricultural census data from the same year reveals that farms operated by Indigenous and Black producers were more often classified in lower economic classes.

In northwest and central Kansas, an ISP called Nex-Tech has managed to deliver last-acre connectivity to some local farms, according to CEO Jimmy Todd.

But Todd — who also serves as board liaison for the Fiber Broadband Association’s Precision Agriculture Working Group — said that level of coverage is rarely attainable.

“It’s expensive, and that’s why it’s such a challenge,” Todd said. “Your small- and mid-sized farms generally are not profitable enough to spend tens of thousands of dollars on network equipment.”

Policy shifts threaten fragile progress

Federal programs have provided lifelines for rural connectivity but their gains have proven fragile. 

A monumental infrastructure law signed in November 2021 by President Biden allocated $65 billion to a slew of broadband programs targeting both affordability and deployment. However, the initiatives remain divided across the FCC, National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), and USDA without sufficient coordination, research shows. 

Over the past decade, the Government Accountability Office, a federal watchdog, has repeatedly flagged “overlap” and “fragmentation” in these programs, urging the White House to adopt a unified “national strategy.” In April, GAO acknowledged the agencies have increased coordination, but that their efforts still fall short. 

Changes under the current administration have hit communities of color hard. In addition to stripping DEI-related criteria from broadband initiatives, the government delivered the toughest blow to a major program from the 2021 law: the Digital Equity Act. 

In May, President Trump announced the end of what he described as a “racist and illegal” $2.75 billion grant program, created to promote digital inclusion and equity. The NTIA notified grantees shortly after.

Brandon Forester, senior campaign lead at the nonprofit advocacy group MediaJustice, said the move undercuts more than communities of color.

“The intent of that law was to make sure that, yeah, people of color are heard from, but also seniors and people in rural areas,” Forester said. “The people in these Trump-supporting, rural red states are going to be hurt just as much or even more by these changes.”

The Trump administration also announced plans to redirect funding under the $42.45 billion Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program away from fiber, the gold standard of connectivity.

Critics argue it was a move to funnel funds to satellite internet technologies — notably, to Elon Musk’s Starlink. 

“There’s no question fiber is the best, but it’s very expensive. It is easy to justify in an urban-suburban area. It is very hard to justify in rural America,” said Garland McCoy, co-founder of the nonprofit Precision Ag Connectivity & Accuracy Stakeholder Alliance. “But satellite broadband has trouble scaling. The quality and speed start to go down when you add customers.” 

Christopher Ali, author of the book “Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics of Rural Connectivity,” said demoting fiber does a disservice to the areas and communities BEAD is meant to target for improvements. 

“We’ve taken an approach to broadband in rural areas that anything is better than nothing. I call it the ‘politics of good enough,’ ” Ali said. “It’s like it doesn’t matter what technology, it doesn’t matter how much there is. It just matters that there’s something there, because that’s all rural Americans deserve.”

Even with enough funding, there’s disagreement on which areas actually have broadband service. 

In 2022, members of Congress raised concerns over the accuracy of the FCC’s National Broadband Map, which the federal government uses to disperse funding. Experts say the problem stems from the map’s reliance on self-reported ISP data. 

“There is a natural inclination to overreport coverage because it keeps competition away,” Ali said. “If I say that I serve this area, it keeps a competitor from seeking out federal funding to go into those areas.” 

That’s what happened in Utica, Mississippi, a rural, majority-Black town featured in a MediaJustice documentary. Despite lacking a reliable network, the FCC map listed Utica as 100% covered, blocking it from federal dollars.

The same pattern plagues tribal areas, according to a 2023 report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis’ Center for Indian Country Development. H Trostle, the report’s co-author and a senior policy analyst at the Minneapolis Fed, also flagged flaws in how the FCC measures access.

“When data points were being put together, a lot of farms got left out, or only the house on the farmland would be included in the data as one of those points,” Trostle said.

Communities can challenge errors through an FCC process, but research finds the system is slow, costly and so complex that it often requires legal help. 

“Why is it that we are mandating that communities double-check the veracity of a provider’s claims?” Ali said. “That’s a huge amount of labor that falls on the community rather than the provider or the federal government.”

Cost of competition for tribes

The U.S. Census counts Native communities as a racial group. In practice, federal policy treats them as sovereign governments. That’s why equity-related cuts don’t affect tribes, which continue to depend on federal funding to build broadband.

But funding is finite. With 574 federally recognized tribes in the U.S., competition is fierce, and those without enough resources fall behind, experts say. 

Securing funds from initiatives like the $3 billion Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program — established in December 2020 to support infrastructure buildout — hinges on the strength of tribes’ grant proposals. And crafting an application with a fighting chance isn’t cheap or easy. Experts say proposals can cost tens of thousands of dollars in staff time and expertise, a high bar for many tribal governments already stretched thin.

Enter specialists like Lee Vasquez-Ilaoa, tribal programs manager at Oklahoma-based project-planning firm Reagan Smith. Vasquez-Ilaoa said she’s spent 20 years writing federal grants.

“How resourced the tribe is dictates if they can apply for any kind of funding,” she said. “To even get to a place where a tribe could be federally funded, they have to have a proposal team, a broadband team, an environmental team, an engineering and design team, and work very closely with the federal government for one to two years before they can even apply for the funding.”

Vasquez-Ilaoa said she worked with 11 tribes through multiple funding rounds of the Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program, always juggling several projects at once, each a complex “web” of its own.

It started with identifying and connecting with key tribal stakeholders. Then came the relentless, months-long hunt for permissions, licenses, financial statements, reservation maps, survey insights and third-party consultations to construct a 200-plus-page proposal — all while maintaining a weekly email dialogue with the federal program officer for critical “relationship-building,” she said. 

The payoff varied. Some well-resourced tribes landed multimillion-dollar awards for their projects. Others walked away with the $500,000 “equitable distribution” award — a “thank-you-for-playing” prize insufficient for major buildout, Vasquez-Ilaoa said.

Now, experts say funds have dried up for the Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program after multiple rounds of funding. Even when funds were available, not all tribes could compete on equal footing. And with many nations being “federally reliant,” as Vasquez-Ilaoa put it, some tribal projects in the neediest of areas stalled before they could begin. 

When tribal communities become providers

When lightning hit the cattle ranch in July, Scott relied on high-speed internet to mobilize neighbors — access she didn’t have growing up.

In 2015, however, fiber finally reached her home after the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe bought a local telecommunications company and secured a $38 million USDA loan to extend service reservation-wide.

“I appreciate what it meant for my tribe to invest in something so significant across such an expansive area of land in such a rural, remote community,” said Scott, an enrolled member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe.

Scott’s uncle and fellow rancher, Guthrie Ducheneaux, presides over the company’s board of directors. He said it continues to expand infrastructure across the reservation and is on track to pay off its federal loan by the early 2030s. 

“I live 54 miles from the central office, nine miles down a gravel road, and I have fiber-optic internet that competes with most urban areas,” Ducheneaux said.

Across Indian Country, nations have stepped in to close the digital divide. Kelli Case, senior staff attorney at the Indigenous Food and Agriculture Initiative, said such efforts reflect a long tradition of tribal problem-solving.

“I never count out any tribe’s capacity to meet the needs of their citizens,” Case said. 

In southeastern Oklahoma, the Choctaw Nation — the country’s third-largest tribe — has built its own broadband team. Broadband director Robert Griffin said he works with multiple carriers and federal partners to expand service across the reservation’s 11,000 square miles, securing hundreds of millions of dollars in support.

By Griffin’s count, about 72% of the reservation now has broadband access under the old federal standard of 25/3 Mbps, a figure expected to reach 80% by the end of 2026. For rancher and tribal councilmember Anthony Dillard, that progress means fiber may finally reach his 700-acre ranch by year’s end. Until then, he relies on Starlink for a connection.

“What I would like to do eventually is to possibly integrate technology like drill monitors, rainfall monitors and stuff of that nature to help me make better management decisions,” Dillard said.

Elsewhere, tribal governments have launched their own internet service providers. 

In south central New Mexico, the Mescalero Apache Tribe established Mescalero Apache Telecom in 1999, which eventually became the reservation’s sole internet service provider. With USDA loans, the company has delivered fiber to homes across all 720 square miles, according to founder and general manager Godfrey Enjady.

“The biggest thing now is education,” said Enjady, who is also president of the National Tribal Telecommunications Association. “How can we best utilize this new resource and tool to hopefully spark economic development, and also maybe look at some new ventures into agriculture?”

Black communities build their own solutions

Local telecoms are known as “community broadband networks,” a term that covers everything from nonprofits to utility cooperatives, according to Christopher Mitchell, director of community broadband networks at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a nonprofit research and advocacy group. 

“The thing that links them all together is that they are focused on providing an important service to the community, to connect the people who are often left behind, and not just figuring out how to maximize wealth extraction,” Mitchell said.

These networks often support people most impacted by the digital divide, including Black communities, Mitchell said. 

In Enfield, North Carolina — a town that’s 88% Black and heavily agricultural — LaShawn Williamson and her husband launched Wave 7 Communications after a 2018 tornado left their home without service for weeks. 

As in many rural communities, Enfield’s largest broadband obstacle was affordability. Major providers, Williamson said, often saddled residents with steep prices, so Wave 7 uses a “pay-for-what-you-use” model built on local trust. Though Enfield’s farms are currently beyond the company’s reach, she said agricultural expansion may be on the horizon.

Hundreds of miles away in Lake Providence, Louisiana — a predominantly Black agricultural town — a coalition of community groups called Delta Interfaith has been working to expand broadband to households and farms. 

The group once had a stake in Louisiana’s proposal for federal BEAD funds. But when the Trump administration dropped BEAD’s fiber-first priority in June, the state redirected money to Starlink instead.

“We’re not pleased because it creates no local jobs,” said Nathanael Wills, an organizer at Delta Interfaith. “None of the money stays in our community.”

As federal dollars dry up, Delta Interfaith and similar organizations say they have little choice but to keep pushing — because without broadband, their communities fall further behind.

“We’re trying every way we can to still bring and build a fiber network,” Wills said. “We’re not giving up.”