Extension Focused Artificial Intelligence To Aid Ohio Soybean Producers

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools have the potential to aid farmers in making on-farm decisions related to crop production, integrated pest management, nutrient use and application, and other farm management decisions. AI has been developed to increase the accuracy of precision agriculture, and model ideal planting populations based on climate. Many of these specialized AI tools are designed for use at the development level and may not be accessible to end users. Widely available general-purpose AI tools can be used to create crop management recommendations by extracting information from publicly accessible web resources. The reliability and utility of AI produced recommendations are contingent on the quality and credibility of the crawled web data resources, as well as the clarity of the user-defined query prompts. Recommendations developed from these general AI tools can be inaccurate, and/or locally irrelevant to Ohio farmers. To develop an AI-based decision support tool tailored for Ohio soybean farmers, leveraging university extension and research resources that will produce agronomic recommendations aligned with Ohio’s environmental conditions and production systems. The Buckeye Bean BOT was developed using a transformer-based large language model (LLM). To train and inform the model, a curated collection of publicly available resources was compiled including websites, publications, research reports, and other materials related to soybean production in Ohio. These resources were used as the primary data source for the LLM. After the model processed and integrated the information through web crawling, the BOT underwent evaluation by a panel of experts and Ohio State University (OSU) Extension professionals to assess its performance and accuracy.The AI-driven “Buckeye Bean Bot” will be available to Ohio soybean producers accessing Ohio State University resources published across college departments and Ohio State Extension websites.