Where agriculture, cooperation grow together

When peo­ple hear the phrase “small farm,” they might pic­ture a few acres of land, a red barn and a trac­tor, and assume there aren’t many of those farms left. How­ev­er, the real­i­ty is actu­al­ly very dif­fer­ent, espe­cial­ly in our ser­vice area.

Accord­ing to the 2022 Cen­sus of Agri­cul­ture, 95% of farms across the coun­try are fam­i­ly owned. More­over, farms that make less than $350,000 in annu­al rev­enue make up the major­i­ty of these oper­a­tions. Small fam­i­ly farms aren’t some­thing of the past, they’re still the back­bone of our country’s agri­cul­ture. As an elec­tric coop­er­a­tive, this mat­ters to us.

In the 1930s and 1940s, rur­al com­mu­ni­ties formed elec­tric coop­er­a­tives to ful­fill a need that had been over­looked. Investor-owned util­i­ties decid­ed it wasn’t prof­itable to run pow­er lines to sparse­ly pop­u­lat­ed areas, but farm­ers and their neigh­bors refused to be left behind. With fed­er­al sup­port from the Rur­al Elec­tri­fi­ca­tion Act, they worked togeth­er to build their own infra­struc­ture and formed local­ly owned util­i­ties run by the same peo­ple they serve.

Today, the state’s 19 elec­tric coop­er­a­tives pro­vide ser­vice for more than 800,000 accounts. We still serve those same found­ing rur­al com­mu­ni­ties, along­side sub­urbs and small towns. As a group, we pow­er more peo­ple than any oth­er util­i­ty in South Car­oli­na.

When we talk about agri­cul­ture, this his­to­ry is why we sup­port our community’s farm­ers. Sup­port­ing small fam­i­ly farms doesn’t just strength­en our local econ­o­my. It con­tin­ues why coop­er­a­tives exist to begin with—to act as neigh­bors com­ing togeth­er to solve shared chal­lenges and raise the qual­i­ty of life in our com­mu­ni­ty.

For York Elec­tric near­ly 85 years ago, it was bring­ing elec­tric­i­ty, and today, it’s expand­ing broad­band inter­net access.

Farms rely on high-speed inter­net in all aspects of their business—marketing prod­ucts online, con­nect­ing with cus­tomers and increas­ing­ly, using new tech­nol­o­gy to man­age things like irri­ga­tion. How­ev­er, broad­band access in rur­al areas still lags behind urban cen­ters. With­out reli­able inter­net, farm­ers can’t adopt new tech­nolo­gies, reach new con­sumers or oper­ate as suc­cess­ful­ly as they could.

That’s why York Elec­tric part­nered with Com­po­ri­um to expand fiber ser­vice to thou­sands of mem­bers in west­ern York Coun­ty. After two years of work, our rur­al inter­net project invest­ed $16 mil­lion in our com­mu­ni­ty, bring­ing reli­able broad­band to 5,000 co-op mem­bers for the first time.

Just like bring­ing pow­er to rur­al farms and homes in the 1940s, this wasn’t about tak­ing the eas­i­est path but choos­ing the right one. When farm­ers and rur­al com­mu­ni­ties have reli­able elec­tric­i­ty and broad­band, our entire com­mu­ni­ty ben­e­fits. Stronger farms lead to stronger com­mu­ni­ties, and YEC is proud to help fos­ter that growth.