Artificial intelligence (AI) is influencing a lot of new farm machinery, from tractors to sprayers to harvesters and more. But it’s not just implements. Every farmer with internet has access to AI right now. Rachael Sharp is a row farmer from Allendale, South Carolina, and found ChatGPT had answers she hadn’t even imagined possible.
“I was getting hundreds of pages of data from everything from my irrigation systems to my tractors, and it was data overload. And so what I did was I tried out ChatGPT, which is the AI platform. I just thought I was going to start by putting information into it. Maybe it would talk to me, talk back to me a little bit, but it ended up spitting back out these very detailed maps that I was able to use on my form, based off of those hundreds of pages of data. It’s really neat. It’s a good thing, and I still use them, then you can use those maps to create even more maps. So it’s been beneficial to our farming operation.”
So what exactly is ChatGPT?
“It’s an app that I downloaded on my phone, and I can enter in pretty much any information. You can text it. You can talk to it so you don’t have to sit there and actually type everything in. It will actually have a conversation with you. It remembers certain things that you tell it. And you know, it is very interactive. You can upload PDFs, you can upload shape files, whatever you want to. And it will then you can say, this is what I want from that material or that information, and out it pops.”
Then Rachael introduced it to her father, who was skeptical at first.
“He didn’t believe it at first, but he sat down and had a conversation with it. Was really amazed, and he even covered the phone when he was talking, and he would look over at me and say, whisper to it, because he wasn’t sure whether ChatGPT was going to hear it, but he was really amazed at what it what it spit out, and was, you know, impressed that it did it so quickly.”
Rachel’s found the app to be a real time saver on the farm…tape
“I don’t have to spend so much time looking over pages and pages and pages of data. It’ll even upload a user manual into it for a new combine that we got about a year ago, and it spit out like a three-page summary of it, you know, like the most important features. And I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is really good,’ because you can’t expect an employee to sit down and read the whole book in just a few weeks. But this was just a short summary of the entire 500-page user manual.”