The Center for Digital Agriculture (CDA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has formed and leads the consortium, AI AgriBench, to evaluate and build confidence in AI-driven question-answering systems that support farmers, agronomists, industry, and the broader agricultural community. This work grows out of research in the CropWizard project in the AIFARMS National AI Institute for agriculture.
This consortium brings together deep technical expertise in both AI and agronomy across leading academic and industry groups to address the challenges posed by these new systems.
The public consortium, led by the CropWizard project within CDA, is creating and overseeing the benchmarking effort. Recent efforts have led to open source systems like CropWizard and proprietary commercial systems, all designed for answering technical questions about agronomy for farmers, agronomists, scientists, and other agriculture professionals. Extensive data sets and software tools within these organizations provide the foundation for building reliable, automated evaluation pipelines based on expert-validated ground truth answers.
If you are interested in joining a mailing list or becoming a contributing consortium member, please use our sign-up form.
Leaders guiding the consortium across research, product, and extension.
Vikram Adve
Committee Chair
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Tami Craig Schilling
Independent Advisor
Former Bayer Executive
Pratik Desai
Founder & CEO
KissanAI
Sachi Desai
VP of AI GtM and Partnerships
Bayer Crop Science
Gershom Kutliroff
Chief Technology Officer
Taranis
Jonathan Lehe
Chief Strategy Officer
Precision Development
J. Mark Locklear
Manager of Digital Systems and IT Operations
The Extension Foundation
Grand Farm Representative
Steering Committee Member
Grand Farm
GROWMARK Representative
Steering Committee Member
GROWMARK
Lakshmi Pedapudi
Director, AI
Digital Green
Bradley Van De Woestyne
John Deere Fellow, Agronomic Sciences
John Deere
David Warren
AI Program Leader
The Extension Foundation
AI AgriBench