Farming Knowledge is Dying But AI Can Save It
Shail Khiyara is the CEO of portfolio company SWARM Engineering, an AI-powered optimization platform that automates complex operational decisions across supply chain, workforce, production, and logistics.
In May, Khiyara brings a compelling piece about how AI is helping the farming succession crisis. Read below for an excerpt from “Farming Knowledge is Dying But AI Can Save It.”
Farmers plan everything, from crop rotations and input timing to equipment cycles, but they don’t plan succession.
The reasons are more structural than personal, and the system makes it hard. Children grow up working the farm but without ownership. Succession conversations get delayed, then avoided. By the time transition becomes urgent, it’s too late.
Underneath all of this sits a deeper issue, that knowledge of how to run the operation lives entirely in one person’s head. Forty years of knowledge—which fields flood in a wet spring, how soil behaves under stress, when to hedge and when to hold, which supplier will actually deliver under pressure—is rarely written down, which means none of it is transferable at scale. When the farmer exits, the land remains. But the intelligence that made it productive disappears.
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