Call it hi-techriculture.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is now accepting grants to bring broadband service to rural areas.  Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack called Universal access to affordable broadband essential to creating jobs and boosting local economies and create jobs.

“All Americans – regardless of where they live – should be able to benefit from the opportunities available in our digital age,” he said, per the Dairy Herd Management trade journal.

State and local governments, corporations and Indian tribes are eligible to apply for grants from $50,000 to $1 million through USDA’s Community Connect Grant Program, which was created to help rural residents tap into the tremendous potential of the internet.

For more info, check out the full story.

Even if cities already have a successful wireless program in place, they can apply for some of the $7.2 billion in rural broadband stimulus money, the Wall Street Journal reports today.

Wes Rosenbalm, who runs a fiber-optic broadband network in Bristol, Va., says reaching spread-out and sparsely populated regions of southwestern Virginia will cost much more than the initial $26 million he raised. “We are committed to getting to every area we can get to,” Mr. Rosenbalm said in a recent interview.

With billions of dollars being rolled into rural broadband projects during the news few years, IBM has stepped forward and announced that it is working with rural electric cooperatives to offer high-speed Internet service delivered over power lines, the New York Times Reports.

The newspaper notes: IBM Global Services and International Broadband Electric Communications, an Alabama company that has developed both the technology and service model to make the system work, began deploying Internet service last year.  This week, the firms announced an expansion to include five more cooperatives in Alabama, Indiana, Michigan and Virginia.

Technology to send broadband over power lines has been around for several years, but it typically hasn’t been able to offer enough capacity at a low enough price to beat service from cable and phone companies.

But with government subsidies, the approach is starting to be deployed in areas that don’t have access to other forms of broadband.  Read the full article here. 

There’s a bit of controversy surrounding the $7.2 billion broadband stimulus package, ranging from “inadequacy to properly address the rural broadband challenge to allegations of inefficiency and outright incompetency of the government agencies tasked with managing it,” WiMax.com reports.  WiMax is like lon-range wireless Internet access.

(It’s also been called the “cyberbridge to nowhere.”) 

However, listen to an interview with a charged up William Wallace, chairman of DigitalBridge Communications in Ashburn, Va.  As he tells WiMax.com:

“We think the broadband stimulus program is great for the country, great for the WiMAX ecosystem, and great for DigitalBridge Communications.  DBC is ready to hit the ground running with numerous shovel-ready projects across multiple states.”

Read more here.