Empowering Smallholder Farmers in the Global South Through Agriculture Chatbots

Governmental agricultural extension systems, which disseminate farm and market practice recommendations, are not always able to ensure all farmers receive adequate guidance. While agriculture chatbots have proven to be a powerful enabler for farmers at large scale, current chat bots struggle with low engagement.

Dr. Ryan Shi, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Intelligent Systems Program, recently received a Google Academic Research Award to address these issues and better reach farmers, particularly smallholder farmers in the global south, through his project “Empowering Smallholder Farmers Through Personalized Engagement.”

Working with Digital Green, a global nonprofit organization, the project will develop a suite of algorithms for smallholder farmer engagement that adopts a holistic, personalized approach to engage smallholder farmers.

“Digital Green told me that they have built an agricultural chatbot and are trying to improve their engagement with their users, i.e. smallholder farmers,” Shi said. “I realized that my research area and my previous projects are a good fit to address this challenge, so we came up with this proposal.”

Smallholder farmers are usually people who produce agricultural products or food on a small scale, typically using their own resources and labor, operating on small farms less than 2 hectares of land. In the global south, smallholder farmers lack access to timely farming information, rendering them vulnerable to climate and market fluctuations.

The project will develop novel algorithms using recommender systems, multi-armed bandit, and large language models. Through these algorithms, the chatbots will be able to inform farmers of farming best practices, market trends, and climate information, as well as answer questions about farming in an interactive way.  

“We hope that this project will bridge the information gap for the farmers, so that they can make better farming decisions with knowledge that already exists somewhere but just hasn't reached them as easily,” Shi said.  “We also hope that this work will raise awareness of the challenges faced by smallholder farmers in the global south, a significant population that has been left behind in the fast economic and technology development, without their voices being sufficiently heard.”