Using AI as a farm planning aid

I'm very skeptical of AI as a long term information source, but I have to report being very impressed with tools like grok as a planning aid. It's like having an army of grad student interns totally dedicated to researching your every question.

I tested grok with some requests for yield analysis and crop suitability in my area and I was pretty impressed with the results.

Had anyone else used AI for similar purposes?

I find AI is good for speeding up 'rough drafts' but can start getting lost when the details count. I haven't used it specifically for agriculture but in other fields I have run into it hallucinating information that was not correct in my experience.

Like any other tool, I think it is useful if you know how to use the tool.

Personally I wouldn't "bet the farm" on it. Though fact checking and correcting its results might generate some new ideas.

This is probably not AI related, but I have and still do, save a lot of time with seedtime and garden planner 2. I don’t know if any of these programs has an AI. I will check it out though, since I need any help I can get lol.
Seedtime  is an online planner, for both design and crops. It helps with calculating when you need to do seeding, transplanting, and harvesting. Our homestead are pretty small, but it helps me keep track of what I have seeded, where I seeded them, and when to harvest. I use the journal function to keep track of when and how much I have harvested. Only negative, is that it’s expensive.
Garden planner 2 is mostly a design program, but I use it to keep track of crop rotation, raised bed garden design and most importantly my design for our food forest garden.

The thing about AI is that you have to know how to ask it questions. Picture AI an AI chatbot as a stranger who doesn't know anything about you or the topic that you are asking about, but they will google whatever you ask and summarize/report the results. You want to make sure you have the right key words. You want to give it a "persona," your goal, your audience, any context, and some sort of boundaries.
For example, if I said "tell me about permaculture," it's gonna rephrase the wikipedia article and other sources. A cooler prompt would be "act as (a given permaculture designer/practitioner), you are trying to convince a commercial vegetable farmer to incorporate permaculture principles into their growing system. How might the conversation go? Tell me how the permaculture designer might convince the farmer to research and implement permaculture practices/systems." Definitely double check the stuff it says. AI isn't good at differentiating between trustworthy sources. If you are in doubt, google the PAARC credibility test. Whenever you read something online, ask yourself its purpose, accuracy (would a simple google search yield the opposite results?) , authority, relevance, and whether it is current. Media literacy is an important skill and one that AI hasn't developed. I always ask it to cite sources so I can tell what came from where and evaluate whether I trust those sources.

Last month I googled how to protect my oriental lilies from the chipmunks that are eating them (they are small enough that they can reach in to the chicken wire bulb cage I fashioned, unlike the bigger squirrels that the cage works great against). The unasked for "AI summary" that appears at the top of every single inquiry now seriously told me that "the best way" to protect my lilies from chipmunks is to PLUCK THEM OFF BY HAND AND DROWN THEM IN A BOWL OF SOAPY WATER.

just something to keep in mind

I feel like certain processes I'm sure are more efficient with AI. But my personally I feel like all the leg work and planning is the fun part. That's where you let your creativity flow. It's your baby. I dunno. I could understand deadlines and stuff with planning though. I personally haven't used AI.

An AI is only as good as:

1)   the programmers who made it.
2)   the data it is feed.


Just as the cloud is someone else's computer storage,   AI is someone else's program....