With planting season right around the corner, farmers are busy preparing for the year ahead. While we can’t control the weather, we can control other factors, one of them being technology. In an Iowa State University Extension dairy webinar, farm management specialist Alexis Stevens highlighted AI’s role when it comes to agronomy. With over 29,000 AI tools available, farmers are taking cropping to the next level.
AI has seen substantial growth over the past 10 years. In 2015, it was estimated that about 3% of ag businesses and farmers used this technology. Fast forward to 2025 and nearly 60% are now adopting various AI tools. While the extent as to what AI can do is nearly infinite, precision agriculture has seen some of the biggest impacts when it comes to the implementation of this technology.
By incorporating AI with precision technology, farmers are now able to get more data about their fields than ever before. AI can help perform soil analyses by using soil sensors to evaluate soil composition and verify moisture levels to recommend planting strategies. This data plays into other aspects of cropping, as it can help farmers make more informed fertilizer, irrigation, and seed optimization decisions because of the feedback received.
Drone usage has gained traction in the agronomy world over the last few years, allowing agronomists to get a better perspective of what’s going on from a bird’s-eye point of view. Drones using AI create the opportunity for farmers to get an even better snapshot of what’s going on in their fields much faster than the human eye. Disease detection has been used to identify early signs of plant disease through image recognition, thus enabling a timely intervention. It can also be used to detect pests and predict their impact, guiding the application of targeted pest control measures. Using spectral imaging, this technology can easily identify nutrient deficiencies early on, creating the opportunity to provide accurate corrective measures.
Some people are still on the fence, though, as the fear of reducing human interaction in the field intensifies. Stevens explained, “All of these things can be done, and they are done, by agronomists, soil scientists, and ag professionals, and they are very good at what they do. But there is the limit of a human being’s ability. You can only walk so many fields in a day, you can only look at so many pictures in one day, and you can only contact so many farmers in one day. The AI tools will not replace these people because we still need someone to verify that AI really did see a disease.”
The good thing is, AI has someone behind it who knows what they’re doing, telling it what to do. “AI is able to take human error out of the equation,” the farm management specialist said. It also provides farmers with the opportunity to spend time with their families or time to do other things that may need their attention. We are only hitting the tip of the iceberg with AI, and it’s exciting what else could be on the horizon for this technology in agriculture.
