FarmerChat - AI-Powered Agricultural Advisory for Inclusive Growth and Climate Resilience

Smallholder farmers produce a significant share of food in India and low- and middle-income countries, yet they face persistent barriers to productivity and income growth. These include climate volatility, rising input costs, pest and disease outbreaks, and limited access to timely, localized agronomic advice. Public agricultural extension systems, while critical, are often underfunded and overstretched. Extension agents typically serve hundreds or thousands of farmers, making personalized, on-demand support infeasible. Women farmers and marginalized groups are disproportionately affected due to lower access to smartphones, mobility constraints, and social barriers. At the same time, advances in AI offer new opportunities to dramatically reduce the cost of delivering expert guidance – if designed responsibly and inclusively. Without careful localization, language support, and governance, however, AI systems risk excluding the very populations they aim to serve. This use case addresses the challenge of how AI can be deployed as a public-interest digital infrastructure to strengthen extension systems, improve farmer decision-making, and enable broad-based economic growth, while remaining accessible, trustworthy, and accountable.

Digital Green is a global nonprofit that uses digital technology and artificial intelligence to improve the livelihoods, resilience, and agency of smallholder farmers. Founded in 2008, Digital Green began by using participatory videos to amplify the reach of public agricultural extension systems. Over time, it has evolved into a digital-first organization that partners with governments, research institutions, and civil society to deliver scalable, farmer-centric advisory services. Today, Digital Green operates across South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, working closely with national and sub-national governments to strengthen extension systems that are chronically under-resourced. Traditional extension models often face worker-to-farmer ratios exceeding 1:1,000, limiting the frequency, timeliness, and personalization of advice—especially for women and underserved farmers. To address this gap, Digital Green has developed FarmerChat, an AI-powered, multilingual, multimodal agricultural advisory assistant. Farmer.Chat enables farmers and frontline extension workers to ask questions via text, voice, or images and receive localized, climate-aware agronomic guidance. The system is designed for low-connectivity environments and supports multiple Indian and African languages. Digital Green’s approach emphasizes responsible AI deployment: grounding responses in trusted agronomic sources, incorporating human feedback loops, and prioritizing equity, transparency, and data privacy. By reducing the marginal cost of high-quality advisory while increasing reach, Digital Green aims to help smallholder farmers make better decisions to improve their productivity, incomes, and resilience.