Farmers Business Network (FBN), a digital farmer network and marketplace, is partnering with the Google AI Futures Fund to build what it calls agriculture's first AI Context Engine, a platform meant to support future AI agents for family farms, American Ag Network reports from the companies' announcement on 29 September.

The problem they describe is that most AI tools give farmers generic advice. The context engine is meant to combine what is specific to each farm, such as its soil type, crops, local weather, markets, equipment and finances, so that AI agents can give advice built on a full picture of that operation.

Under the partnership, Google will give FBN early access to frontier models and expertise in model development, and FBN will test advanced models on complex agricultural reasoning tasks to improve how AI performs in real farm settings.

"Software isn't the bottleneck anymore, securing rich farm context is," said FBN chief executive Diego Casanello. He said the engine will power FBN's own AI system, Norm, and later third-party developers, while "keeping farmers in full control of their data". Jonathan Silber, co-founder and director of the AI Futures Fund, pointed to FBN's decade of work with hundreds of thousands of farmers in the US and Canada.

FBN launched its Norm AI Ag Advisor in 2023; it now serves the network's more than 140,000 members, giving tailored advice on crop protection, seed choice and equipment maintenance. The AI Futures Fund backs AI start-ups with early access to Google DeepMind models, capital and mentoring.

Photo: NASA Earth Observatory, Jesse Allen / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Source: American Ag Network