Beth Ford, Land O’Lakes CEO, outlines key issues that she believes should be focused on. 


Land O’Lakes CEO defines how to close the digital divide 

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beth I want to I want to start with you here. You know, you've been talking about the digital divide for years now, explain what it is and tell us how Covid really exposed this in a different way. I think it exposed a broader set of a set of folks versus what I had seen. So I took over as ceo this will be my fourth year and one of the first things I did was go out into the country. Now we are a farmer on cooperative by the way. It's national Farmers day today. Thank you farmer, thank you farmer. And so when I was out in these communities and I'm from Iowa originally my recognition is the deterioration of these communities and this means rural healthcare is unavailable. Education is a challenge. Fresh food, you know, 78% of the counties in America, that index that food insecure are in rural America. They don't have child care. I mean there are a number of key issues mama recognition was that there was only so much that we could do. But what, what I knew we had to do was put the greatest enabler of our time technology in place because then we can have um telemedicine tell education, we can access um you know, access and have job creation and job creation has lagged in rural communities. And so to your point, we started talking about this three years ago, it was made obvious to all of us who were now educating our kids at home trying to get telemedicine appointments, things like that. And it was it was made much more urgent, invisible to everybody and for that, I'm grateful, but yet a painful lesson for all of us to understand. All right, so the secretary, you're, you're poised to really tackle this issue in a big way, give us the background here. So, good afternoon, it's great to be with you and it's fun that we're back in person this year. So it's really wonderful to be here. Uh I agree with everything Beth said, I mean, I think covid exposed to all of us that broadband, high speed internet is not a luxury kids who didn't have it really didn't go to school for a year, 35% of Americans who live in rural America don't have high speed internet, 50% of people who live on tribal lands do not have high speed internet. So if you were a school age kid growing up on a tribal land, chances are you missed a whole year of school last year. There were these heartbreaking um you know, stories of people having teachers driving paper lessons to their kids at the end of the day, so the kids can fill out the worksheet. So, you know, this is real and as Beth said, it's not just school, it's, it's work, it's a small business. The businesses that went out of business where the smallest and the least tech enables and often didn't have broadband. So what we need to do, um his, you know, provide broadband to everyone. The Department of Commerce is in the middle of that, we have an initiative for tribal broadband. I'm, I played a big role in negotiating with the senate the broadband portion of the president's infrastructure package, which I really hope congress passes. And that will be $65 billion dollars to provide broadband. Some of it is laying fiber, you know, a lot of places, rural places don't have fiber, some of it. Uh, you know, I'm from Rhode island, there's no rural Rhode island. It's a city state if anyone has never been there, but a lot of people don't have broadband because if you live, uh, if you live in a affordable housing, apartment building, your community might have broadband, but it's not connected to your apartment building Or maybe it is, but it's $100 a month. So in implementing this, I'm going to be very focused on the details and you know, God's in the details, this is about execution and we want to be flexible. So if what you need is about affordability, then that's what we're gonna use the money for what you need, is laying fiber, that's, we'll use the money for what you need is digital literacy and hardware. You know what good is broadband, if you don't have a computer, then that's what we're going to really focus on. But at the end of the day, If we do our job right. When we're done with this $65 billion, every american will have high feed, affordable Internet. Mm Yeah.