AI for Farmers: Friend or Foe?

The potential benefits keep emerging: autonomous equipment, precision spraying, crop monitoring, and livestock management. Artificial intelligence (AI) helps guide producers in their decision-making as they search for efficiencies in time, cost, and labor demands.

AI can utilize data from myriad sources like satellites, drones, field sensors, and weather forecasts. Additional information can help farmers know when crops are stressed, disease begins to form, irrigation needs to get enhanced, and fertilizer application requires adjustments.

When profitability for so many farmland owners and investors gets squeezed, it could find a boost with AI’s assist.

Warning about artificial intelligence

But there is a new warning out from a group of more than 200 economists and researchers (included in this group are 16 Nobel laureates, previous winners of the prestigious Nobel Prize for contributing to a globally significant breakthrough in physics, chemistry, physiology, medicine, literature, peace, or economic science).

The warning is for policymakers everywhere: artificial intelligence could disrupt the economy in a host of ways – not all beneficial – and decision makers must create policies and boundaries to address what is happening.

“We Must Act Now” headlines the warning letter and includes three main points:

1. AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years.

2. This could drive an unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter time frame. It could bring risks, including large-scale job displacement, as well as opportunities such as major gains in living standards.

3. Economists, policymakers and technology leaders must act now to understand the economics of transformative AI and to build the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society.

RELATED: Well-known investor Steve Eisman shared his thoughts on the future of AI when he sat down for a discussion at the Land Investment Expo in 2025.

AI spending in the United States

But spending on AI development is driving a significant share of the growth in the U.S. economy, which has been dragged down by tariffs, inflation, and the war with Iran.

“The US economy really is the AI economy now,” a Yahoo! Finance story began. The story pointed to AI as the primary driver in growth. Business development, led by spending in AI, surpassed consumer spending in the 1^st quarter of 2026.  

META (formerly Facebook), Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, and Amazon – some of the world’s largest companies – account for more than half a billion dollars in business development spending as they race for AI dominance.

“AI-related spending is providing much of the growth in the U.S. economy today,” the Economic Policy Institute report said in March. “Business investments in structures and equipment (capex) that are driven by AI firms have accelerated noticeably in the past year.”

The piece questioned how much of the investment for AI technology was truly American.

“How much of this investment consists of imports rather than U.S.-based production is an open and important question,” the report stated. “Even more important is the wealth effect on consumption from the AI stock boom, which seems to have firmly entered bubble territory. Combined, the capex spending and the consumption spending spurred by the stock market bubble are adding over a percentage point to GDP growth.”

AI could aid agriculture. At a time when its rapid expansion is pulling up the American economy, it could also necessitate scrutiny from state and federal politicians, who must decide whether our nation’s laws and policies are prepared for the effects that this new technology will bring to our population, food production, and overall economy.

RELATED: Supporters of AI hope that the technology can improve profitability for farmers. Here is one area that is becoming a growing concern for farmers due to foreign competition.