Happenings: AgTech Alchemy will be hosting an “AgTech Alchemy: The Whole Hog” event on July 22, 2025 around Tech Hub Live. Do register at the link. Tech Hub Live is offering a $ 100 off on registration if you use the special AgTech Alchemy promo code (Promo Code AATHL25).
I will be moderating a panel titled “AI Tools in Agriculture: What to Know Before You Buy In” at Tech Hub Live in Des Moines on July 23, 2025.
I appeared on Joe Mosher’s “The Pacesetter Pod” with Patrick Honcoop to talk about AI and Digital Strategy in Agriculture. This is a good episode.
Programming Note: I am a big fan of Patrick O’Shaughnessy and what his group has built at “Colossus”. One of the mental models for Metal Dog Labs is to attempt to build a Colossus for Food and Agriculture with a diversity of voices and perspectives.
With this in mind, I am running my first experiment by bringing on Dr. Tuesday Simmons to share her perspective over the next few months about soil microbiome and its importance to agriculture and the development of new technologies.
Starting off with an introduction to the microscopic life inhabiting cropland soils, together we’ll explore the integral role these creatures play in nutrient cycling and soil structure, the relationships they have with plants, how they impact soil health, and what this all means for farming practices and the rapidly growing biological product market.
This will be a once a month series for a few months beginning in July.
Dr. Tuesday Simmons earned a PhD in microbiology from the University of California, Berkeley for research into the effects of drought on cereal crop microbiomes. Post-graduate school, she has worked for start-up companies in R&D, sales, and marketing roles with the goal of effectively communicating the value of cutting-edge biotechnology. As an Application Scientist at Isolation Bio, she worked with leading gut microbiome researchers to improve high-throughput microbial isolation for academic and pharmaceutical purposes. At Root Applied Sciences and Trace Genomics, she has worked to leverage microbiome research for farmers and agronomists. Since 2024, she has worked as a freelance science writer and consultant.
Now onto this week's edition!
Amara’s Law, Roombas and Rough Edges
I. CCAs or LLMS?
With the blistering pace of capability development with AI, questions about technology adoption, and its impact on employment, society and economy are everywhere.
Last week, I gave a talk for the American Society of Agronomy at their Sustainable Agronomy Conference. The topic was “Sensors, Automation, and Digital Agronomy.”
The audience was mostly current agronomists, and students of agronomy and other agriculture sciences. The audience had many questions about what is the evolving role of agronomists, what kind of problems can be solved (or not solved) by AI today etc.
Today, the common trope about AI in agriculture is that at some point in the future the profession of an agronomist will cease to exist and will be overtaken by AI.
I have heard this many times.
In-fact wrote a tongue-in-cheek post about this topic as early as April 2023, with an aptly click-baity title CCAs or LLMS? (CCA = Certified Crop Advisor). It made many people mad at me at the time, especially the ones who didn’t read the whole piece till the end.
I had ended the piece,
How might technologies like robotics, automation, and LLMs augment human intelligence, intuition, and experience and how will it change what it means to be involved with agriculture and farming?
It is CCAs and LLMs not CCAs or LLMs.
The whole discussion brings up an interesting question on how new technology gets adopted, at what pace does it get adopted, and what impact it has on the existing ecosystem.