Artificial Intelligence and the Agricultural Workforce

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

As new technology makes its way onto farms, some are wondering what this means for the job security of farmworkers. John Kempf and the team at Advancing Eco Agriculture developed FieldLark AI. He says the real value in these tools isn’t in replacing people. Instead, Kempf argues for the collaboration of AI and human workers.

Kempf… “ But when it comes to strategy, our unconventional strategy are the kind of these intuitive aspects. Humans can beat the machines consistently, and so the most powerful combination is actually human plus AI working together. I think this is particularly appropriate for agriculture because so many of the decisions, the agronomic decisions that a farmer makes, and the decisions that agronomists get challenged on and get asked to work together on, so many of those decisions are decisions about edge cases. Do I make an application today or do I wait a week? And so it's all these edge cases where the combination of intuition and lived experience is extremely important and cannot be duplicated with technology in the near term. Can it in a decade or two? Maybe to an approximation. But what technology can do and what it should be doing, in my opinion, is it should be guiding humans and amplifying their strengths.”

Once again, that’s John Kempf of Advancing Eco Agriculture.