​Taranis launches Ag Assistant™ to transform farm decision making

Taranis, the global leader in crop intelligence, announces revolutionary AI advancements in the ag sector with the introduction of its Ag Assistant™. A first for agriculture retailers and producers, Ag Assistant is powered by a generative AI model that integrates data sources from various modalities – including images, text and audio – and with a profound understanding of agronomy.

Taranis Ag Assistant will revolutionize the agriculture industry by providing field-specific, detailed, comprehensive insights and actionable recommendations to advisors and growers with unprecedented timeliness and accuracy, introducing an entirely new approach to farm management for the age of AI.

"Taranis has pioneered an AI agent in agriculture that enables and equips the agronomists serving producers," says Chief Commercial Officer Jason Minton. "Ag Assistant enhances the service retail organizations provide to their growers. Having an instantaneous understanding of the issues and the optimal solution creates efficiencies and opportunities the industry has never seen before."

Powering Ag Assistant is a GenAI model trained on a wealth of proprietary agronomic data spanning several years of in-season crop intelligence gathered from fields across the continental U.S., in conjunction with additional sources of data such as weather maps, machinery data, university research reports and industry-specific product studies. The scope of this rich training dataset, carefully curated and validated, endows this model with capabilities that are not available in other generic (non-agriculture) models.

According to Gershom Kutliroff, Taranis Chief Technology Officer, "Many factors contribute to the overall health and productivity of a field – weather conditions, the traits of the seed hybrid used, nutrients in the soil, the prevalence of weeds and the likelihood of herbicide-resistant strains, to name a few. It is a formidable task for an agronomist to gather and analyze all of these disparate sources of data to formulate an effective recommendation on how best to treat problems and maximize yields. Leveraging many of the most recent advances in generative AI, Ag Assistant is the agronomist's indispensable tool, retrieving the various data sources, analyzing how they fit together, and presenting the agronomist with a clear picture of what is happening in his fields, as well as the actions to take to remedy problems and maximize the fields' productivity."

Taranis enables advisors to identify and address opportunities to improve productivity in growers' fields by scouting all crop conditions and threats in a timely, effective manner. Ag Assistant takes this service to the next level by thoroughly analyzing the leaf-level data captured by Taranis and contextualizing it with relevant industry research and current seasonal trends to promptly generate comprehensive and actionable reports. Provided immediately following individual scouting missions and on a season-long basis, Ag Assistant reports will drive product recommendations, nutrient management and input decisions during the season and leading up to the next crop cycle.

Minton explains, "As an example, consider a scenario in which Ag Assistant identifies a widespread specific weed threat, indicating that the prescribed weed management program did not work. Rather than an agronomist spending hours and days during the growing season manually walking and scouting fields, reviewing seed hybrid information, weather history and forecast, herbicide label information, identified weed control, etc., Ag Assistant will immediately generate a detailed, expert-level agronomy report to the agronomist that analyzes those factors and more to provide a targeted control recommendation for the specific field and farm in question."

In an already stressed agriculture financial economy, Taranis' Ag Assistant enables advisors and growers to address and maximize productivity and profitability by improving the timeliness, precision and accuracy with which they can respond to threats, company CEO Opher Flohr explains.

"The next revolution for production agriculture efficiency and performance is here—it is Ag Assistant. A little more than a decade ago, we watched GPS and autosteer change how the industry operated," says Taranis CEO, Opher Flohr. "Today, those technologies aren't considered an addition; they're necessities in reaching production and profitability goals. Ag Assistant allows growers to maximize their profitability by carefully managing every aspect of production in partnership with their retailers."