Most information was then available free of charge on CNBC, the Weather Channel or Web sites run by Farm Journal and Pioneer, a seed and plant genetics division of DuPont.

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Competitors include small firms such as Farmlogs, a Web startup that focuses on crop data, and software maker Farm Works, as well as John Deere, which has software and Web support for managing crop production and machinery.

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His intention was to connect the data coming from farm machinery directly to the Web.

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Does it make sense to ban the old light bulb in a world where we are encouraged to store Terrabytes of pointless photographs forever on fire-hot Web-servers forever spinning in a Google server farm?

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White's 1952 children's novel "Charlotte's Web, " Charlotte the spider explains to Wilbur the pig that life on the farm is not what it appears to be.

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JirboMatch, which jazzes up the familiar game of "Memory" with images of cartoon farm animals, is the most popular of more than 730 iPhone applications listed on Apple's Web site.

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