Will Sargent On The Power of AI For Farmers

There are two things that most farmers never have enough of. Time and money. We’re always looking for new ways to get the job done quicker and cheaper, without having to compromise on output.
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With the right weather, a bumper cereal harvest is always a possibility, but without investing in expensive inputs like pesticides or fertiliser, you’re unlikely to achieve your goal. One of the biggest problems facing the industry, is that the margins farmers make on food production are getting thinner every year and this puts huge pressure on cashflows. The solution for many farm businesses is to pivot away from traditional farming and supplement their income through diversification projects.
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Farmers are natural entrepreneurs but adding new income streams like glamping, self-storage or a farm shop, will inevitably add to the workload and could mean we lose sight of where the core of our business really is.
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This is where Artificial Intelligence has the potential to transform the way we operate. Imagine a world where all your marketing content, website, social media posts and even grant applications can be created in seconds. That’s what AI can do. I recently spoke at the Farm Business Innovation Show in Birmingham alongside NOAN co- founder Neal Mann, and it was great to hear from farmers how AI could help transform their businesses.
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One farmer told us: “This means I don’t have to employ someone to do this now, I couldn't have afforded that before” and that’s exactly what we wanted to hear. Having a great business idea is often the easy part but bringing it to market and making it work for your customers is the tricky part.
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I set up a self-storage business on my farm almost three years ago, and had I had AI at my fingertips, the marketing side would have been simple and taken a fraction of the time. AI isn’t just about diversification. It also has the power to get more income from existing environmental schemes and grants that almost all farmers can access.
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The Sustainable Farming Initiative (SFI) is the government’s new way of getting cash directly into the hands of farmers. Put simply, you look at a map of your farm and pick environmental options from a menu, depending on what works for your land. Each option is worth different amounts and its flexible. Sounds simple right? Wrong.
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Apparently, there are 40,000 different combinations within SFI, and farmers are expected to navigate through all of these and come up with a workable scheme. You don’t have to be an expert to realize that many farmers are frankly bewildered by this level of detail and are worried about committing to something that they don’t fully understand or trust.
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Millions of pounds are going unclaimed every year, and if this continues, government will have an excuse to cut the farming budget. There’s got to be a better way to get this money into the hands of farmers and this is where AI comes into play.

AI can save farmers time and money, by speeding the process up. Not only can it trawl through the SFI system and come up with solutions to fit your farm, but it can also search for grants that you can apply for right now and even write applications for you. Knowledge has always been power and that’s something that farmers have in abundance. Now, through AI, we can start to monetize this knowledge far more than we ever have done before.
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Forget the scare stories about giving away data and AI controlling us. The right AI platforms that put farmers in the driving seat will revolutionize the entire industry.

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