Alex Kirkpatrick

A CSANR team is developing an asynchronous online training course focused on understanding and communicating artificial intelligence (AI) within sustainable agriculture. Funded through a grant from Western Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education, the project, titled “Creating an Online Toolbox for Understanding and Communicating Artificial Intelligence within Sustainable Agriculture,” aims to go live in 2025. The course will equip ag-professionals with the knowledge, skills, and efficacy necessary to facilitate engagement around AI issues.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is filtering your spam, gatekeeping your newsfeed, chatting with you online, and underpinning many of your regular activities. Many vaunt the potential of AI in agriculture to help land-managers adapt to uncertain and extreme weather, increase production through automation, mitigate greenhouse gas production through optimized precision farming and more. Realizing any of this potential depends on addressing potentially negative unseen effects and barriers to adoption, like a lack of transparency in AI systems and science and issues of data integrity.