How AI Technology Will Shape Agriculture

There’s little denying that the hottest pair of buzzwords around the globe right now are artificial intelligence (AI). No matter the industry, AI discussion has become the norm in the world of 2025.

Because of this, the Mid America CropLife Association (MACA) asked its keynote speaker to look at the topic of AI and agriculture at the group’s recent annual meeting in early September. That speaker, Elizabeth Fastiggi, Chief Product Officer with Idealyst Innovation, started her speech telling attendees how recent world events are shaping this discussion on AI.

“These past six to seven months, two themes have dominated the conversation,” said Fastiggi. “The first is uncertainty absolutely abounds. Whether we are talking about where we are in our local economies to global affairs and how that is impacting our futures. Uncertainty is weighing heavily on people’s minds.

“The second thing is closer to home – agriculture is in a tough spot,” she continued. “Whether you are looking at where commodity prices are or the consecutive years of net farm losses, many folks are arguing that we are in an unusually cyclical downturn in agriculture.”

Coupled with these “30,000-foot view trends,” the world is also seeing plenty of changes when it comes to other areas that impact agriculture – demand and production.

“On the demand side, we are seeing some real differences in global affluence and the types of products being wanted by consumers,” said Fastiggi. “There’s more demand for fresh fruits and vegetables and other healthier options.

“On the production side, we are getting a lot of headwinds,” she continued. “More extreme weather events and the role that new technologies should play. Any one of these is pretty consequential, but when you look at them in aggregate, we will require a very new approach and the ability of thinking through multiple factors to manage.”

In the end, argued Fastiggi, operators have two options with how to deal with all these changes – ignore or embrace.

“You can hunker down, retrench and weather the storm changing nothing,” she said, “or you can look over the horizon and try to get your arms around these risks and leverage new tools to do better forecasting and understanding.”

That, said Fastiggi, is where AI comes into the picture.

“AI is actually changing what’s in our span of control and giving us tools to do better forecasting and be more strategic in our long-term learning,” she said. “And the speed at which we can ingest data and do forecasting has accelerated substantially because of machine learning and AI.”

According to Fastiggi, this is happening in the world of 2025 for three reasons. The first is the cost of compute capacity has dropped significantly over the past few years. The second is advancement in overall machine learning.

Thirdly, there’s a proliferation of data taking place.

“We are able to generate and capture data at an unprecedented rate today,” she said.

Luckily, Fastiggi added, agriculture seems poised to marry all these trends given the way it already operates on a daily basis.

“Agriculture is a very data rich industry,” she said. “It has gotten very good at capturing data with machinery it already has on the farm. And generative AI offers the industry the ability to boost productivity by automating a lot of the tasks in many ways it has not been able to do before.”

• Read Elizabeth Fastiggi’s: How AI Expands Our Sphere of Control for a Resilient Future

While some observers might dismiss the push to AI in agriculture as a fad, Fastiggi told MACA attendees she believed otherwise.

“Agriculture is at a crossroads today, and this movement is not hype of something that will fade away,” she said. “We have an emergence of technical progress with an understanding of the economic potential AI and machine learning systems have to offer.”

Fastiggi ended her speech with a challenge to the entire agricultural community when it comes to employing AI in their operations.

“What we are seeing is a real structural and transformative change in the industry – something that’s really been building for a while,” she concluded. “The reason I want to challenge us is because farming is complicated. But using the next generation of AI, we can look differently at what’s inside vs. outside our span of control.”