Artificial intelligence technology is creeping into many different aspects of our lives, but it doesn’t always tell the truth.

The people who developed the most popular AI tools were trying to build systems that can always provide people with answers to any question. Unfortunately, many of these same programmers never taught these AI systems to say “I don’t know” when the answers elude them, or how to differentiate between reliable and unreliable sources of information as well as a human could. So they sometimes give answers that are wrong or even bizarre. When AI systems make up answers to questions, programmers call these “hallucinations”. For most users, these hallucinations can be humorous. For farmers, they can be disastrous.

Rikin Gandhi, CEO of Digital Green, understands this problem well. He and his team aspire to deliver to farmers AI-empowered advice that will help them grow more food. Still, Gandhi knows that AI tools for farmers mustn’t hallucinate.

“There’s a need to set up guardrails,” Gandhi said.

Rikin Gandhi was the guest of honor at a recent online panel discussion hosted by Grow Further. Our founder and CEO, Peter Kelly, was also a featured speaker at the event. Together, Gandhi and Kelly discussed the use of AI technology to benefit smallholder farmers. Attendees tuned in from around the world to enjoy the talk and learn more about Grow Further.

AI is at the foundation of Digital Green’s work. The nonprofit organization uses AI technology to enhance agricultural extension services for smallholder farmers. For 18 years “we’ve been using technology to improve the efficiency of agricultural extension programs that can serve and improve the agricultural development and livelihoods of small-scale farming communities in South Asia as well as sub-Saharan Africa,” Gandhi told the audience.

Today, Digital Green is pushing ahead with its strategy to deliver improved and locally relevant agricultural extension to millions of smallholder farmers. That means involving the farmers in the production of these video tips and tutorials. “We’ve been using videos that have been produced by and for farmers to share practices more efficiently using testimonials, demonstrations,” he explained. “We’re seeing that farmers are now able and are seeking information to be able to triage the various types of issues that they see on their farms.”

Local needs in local languages

Rikin Gandhi is the co-founder and CEO of Digital Green. With backgrounds in computer science and aerospace engineering and degrees from Carnegie Mellon University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he is putting his skills to use molding Digital Green into the food security pioneer it is today.

Racing to keep ahead of climate change, Digital Green produces extension videos in local languages that incorporate a wide array of information resources, including data from global research centers, information on weather patterns and climate, and even market data. It’s all delivered to smallholder farmers in local languages they can understand and voice-overs, text messages, pictures, and videos that these same farmers can relate to. At the heart of their strategy are the extension agents they rely on to get these messages into the fields and in front of farmers who need them.

Mix in advanced AI, and together agricultural extension agents can detect emerging problems at farmers’ fields quickly and deliver answers to vexing questions that farmers are receptive to.

Gandhi insists that the delivery of enhanced agricultural extension services isn’t a one-way street. Digital Green is constantly learning from smallholder farmers and adapting the organization’s technologies and services to meet farmers’ needs.

Localizing the delivery of these video consultations is key, he said.

“There’s a need for local language and dialect capability,” Gandhi said. Over the years they’ve grown familiar with the kinds of questions farmers in need are likely to ask. At the same time “what we’re also finding is that about 30% of the queries go unanswered because there isn’t this locally relevant information,” he said.

There’s a lot of ground to cover. Though Gandhi says Digital Green has produced more than 10,000 extension videos, there are hundreds of thousands of communities to reach. “At a village level, that becomes pretty sparse,” he said.

AI’s risks and rewards

Rikin Gandhi’s talk at the Grow Further-hosted session was informative and educational. Though he’s an optimist, Gandhi came off as a realist, as well. He acknowledged the “hallucination” problem where other AI enthusiasts might have steered clear of the topic. “There can be low-quality information in AI models,” he admitted.

Kelly, who is trained as an economist, noted another risk in agriculture in AI. If it lowers the cost of production, consumers benefit but farmers who aren’t in a position to use it could lose. 

“On balance, there is a huge potential here,” Kelly said.

During the wide-ranging discussion, our own Peter Kelly explained how Grow Further is funding a project to help researchers in Tanzania use AI and machine learning to build a smartphone app that can help farmers detect early signs of crop diseases and pests. We were attracted to this project for its potential to scale up quickly. It’s the type of technology that could potentially touch the lives of millions.

Gandhi said that’s precisely what Digital Green is hoping to achieve with its AI-enhanced extension services.

The key to success? “Make sure that these technologies are accessible,” Gandhi said, “and are at a low cost so that these farmers can see a [return on investment] that is substantial enough.”

“We’ve been able to reduce the cost of the conventional extension programs from $35 US to get one farmer to adopt a new practice that is climate resilient down to about $3 ½ US,” he said.

During a Q&A session, one audience member suggested that there was great potential for a partnership between Digital Green and Grow Further. We agree. Both organizations have the same goal—a more food-secure future, and in this war against hunger and malnutrition, it’s all hands on deck.

“There is no silver bullet,” Gandhi said.

 — Grow Further

Photo credit: Rikin Gandhi speaking at the recent online panel discussion on AI in smallholder farming.