The Four Roles for AI in Agronomy

Eric Sfiligoj By Eric Sfiligoj|

For the past several years, one of the major buzz terms in agriculture has been artificial intelligence (AI). Many ag equipment companies such as John Deere are now actively launching new products powered by AI. And other market experts predict even more uses of AI going forward.

At last year’s Field Forward Event, hosted by Nutrien Ag Solutions, Paul Bonnett, Senior Director of Digital Agronomy and Data Services, talked with attendees about all the ways AI implementation might play out for agriculture and agronomists.

“We’ve been looking at AI since March of 2024,” said Bonnett. “Machine-enabled agronomy is the future of agriculture.”

According to Bonnett, his team sees four different areas where AI technology can help agronomists, in the short term. The first is providing human readable insights.

Paul Bonnett

“With AI, we can leverage our internal propriety data science and translate it into contextual reliable insights to lower the cognitive load of interpretation,” he said. “In other words, we can produce a huge amount of data for humans to use.”

The second area for AI use in agriculture is tied to labor. Here, AI programs can be used to target new crop consultants and emerging areas of agronomy to accelerate training using specialized chat-like capabilities to enable self-learning.

The third is building confidence in product use. “Here, AI can be used to enable our crop consultants to access on-demand crop protection and seed label information specific to state and use practices,” said Bonnett.

Finally, AI can be used to help solve agricultural’ s persistent data problems. “Ag data has always been there,” he said. “There are files, there are PDFs, multiple formats. Using AI, we can convert these into one standardized dataset for use.”

Which of the four roles for AI do you think will become most important?

View Results

Loading ... Loading ...

However, Bonnett was quick to emphasize that Nutrien doesn’t see AI as a threat to human operators. “We don’t see AI replacing the agronomist,” he concluded. “Instead, we see it as an aid to the agronomist.”

Editor’s note: This article originally published in November 2024.

0

Sfiligoj is the Editor for both CropLife and CropLife IRON magazines. He travels regularly to cover industry events and has been dedicated to the ag retail industry since he joined the staff in 2000. See all author stories here.

Advertisement