AI takes on several meanings in modern agriculture

Opinion

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This article was published 12/10/2024 (365 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In an industry loaded with acronyms, it can at times get a little confusing to know what they all represent, especially when the same acronyms sometimes stand for very different things.

Take AI, for example. In livestock circles, it stands for artificial insemination, which is how producers can improve the genetic quality of their stock without having to manage another bull, stallion or boar around the place.

Over the past few years, however, AI is more commonly used in references to artificial intelligence, which is about using computing power and machine learning to aggregate data into knowledge and find answers quickly. While not specifically tied to agriculture, these applications now permeate daily life on the farm, even as farmers remain blissfully unaware of those sensors and data-collection points operating in the background on their farm equipment.

Now there’s a new AI — or perhaps more aptly described as an old one — entering the modern agricultural vocabulary: ancestral intelligence.

It surfaced this week in a speech by Sanah Baig, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s assistant undersecretary of agricultural research, education and economics, at a Minneapolis conference focused on making the agricultural and food system more resilient to climate change.

Baig told the audience of corporate sustainability officers, non-profit organizations and farmers that in addition to investing billions of dollars into agricultural innovation, including artificial intelligence, robotics and biotechnology, the department recognizes there is a need to learn from past practices — many of which embraced the principles of what is now known as “regenerative agriculture.”

Baig said in a later interview she adopted the phrase “ancestral intelligence” after hearing a Hawaiian delegate use it at a food security conference. It aptly reflects a new focus within the USDA on working more closely with tribal nations and university agriculture faculties.

“I think it’s so representative of the type of acknowledgement that we’re making at USDA right now, which is that we can, and we must learn from our ancestors,” Baig said. “They have been stewarding the land and our forests for generation after generation, and they’ve been doing it in harmony with nature.”

Baig said U.S. agriculture must wean itself from the course set in the 1970s when then-secretary of agriculture Earl Butz told farmers they need to plant “fence row to fence row” and to “get big or get out.”

“We became hyper-efficient, but that came at the expense of our robust market competition, of supply chain resiliency and food and worker safety,” Baig said, noting the COVID-19 pandemic underscored the perils of too much supply chain concentration.

Baig paints a stark picture of how dramatically the U.S. agricultural landscape has changed as the number of farmers continues to shrink, those who remain in the business grow older and farmland disappears at an alarming rate. It’s one that closely mimics the Canadian scene.

She called for a revolutionary change in the food system, starting with a more holistic approach.

“We have this once-in-a-generation opportunity to do things better. I hope that we can learn from our past mistakes, how focusing on one thing like hyper-productivity or maybe just climate change can lead to unintended consequences down the road,” she said. “We’re all here striving to build an entirely new system, one that has multiple complementary systems of production.”

Many of the 150 or so individuals attending this conference would endorse her message, but the reality is that many work for companies heavily invested in the status quo, such as major grain companies, food processors and fertilizer and chemical suppliers.

They are tasked with helping their employers meet sustainability goals while maintaining profit margins and fending off accusations of “greenwashing.”

Increasingly, they are looking for help from the farmers who supply them with raw ingredients or who use the products they sell.

After all, a farmer producing crops year in and year out on land that’s been in the family for generations is bound to know a thing or two about sustainability.

Laura Rance is executive editor, production content lead for Glacier FarmMedia. She can be reached at lrance@farmmedia.com