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Overview

The CropWizard research project is exploring ways in which advances in Generative AI can help address difficult challenges in production agriculture. Major priorities being addressed include:

• Reliable agronomic advisory or “virtual extension” services for farmers, extension specialists, policy makers, and the public;
• Formal benchmarking of Ag Advisory services through the industry-facing AI AgriBench Benchmarking Consortium;
• Improving the accuracy of image-based diagnosis of crop stresses;
• Optimized data-driven decision making for profitable, sustainable and regenerative farm management;
• Foundation models for various aspects of production agriculture, trained using crop models, agroecosystem models, and other computational sources; and
• Advanced long-horizon reasoning and tool use for complex, open-ended agronomic decisions.

Software

CropWizard is built on open-source software that is free for non-commercial use. The system is based on the Illinois Chat framework for building interactive question-answering and decision making systems, using a combination of RAG (document retrieval), image analysis, reasoning, tool use, and agents.

Funding

The CropWizard project is sponsored by the AIFARMS National AI Institute for Agriculture, under USDA NIFA Award No. 2020-67021-32799. Additional funding is provided by University of Illinois Center for Digital Agriculture (CDA), the Discovery Partners Institute (DPI), the IBM Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute (IIDAI), and the Amazon Research Awards (ARA) program.