Artificial intelligence is about to become the most valuable tool in American agriculture. The question is who builds it, who controls it, and whether the United States will lead or hand another strategic industry to a foreign adversary.
At this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Jeff Rowe, CEO of foreign-controlled Syngenta Group, argued in an essay that AI can combine farm data and agronomic expertise to transform agriculture. His piece raised the question of how AI could be used to reduce the complexity growers face every day: soil tests, field notes, water decisions, and input records. He also noted that 160,000 U.S. farms have disappeared since 2017, and wrote that “resilience and innovation” is “needed now more than ever” to reverse that trend.
In that, he is correct. However, that raises a more important question: when AI becomes the intelligence layer behind modern farming, who controls that system, who benefits, and to whom do they answer?
WHERE’S THE BEEF IN THE 2026 FARM BILL?
Consider what an AI-integrated farm management system will enable at scale. While the efficiency gains for individual farmers are real, such a system could be used to create a comprehensive, real-time map of American agricultural production. Once sufficiently advanced and integrated, if controlled by misaligned interests, this could present significant risks to American agricultural production, making its future infrastructure relevant to U.S. national security.
Few pillars of national security are more fundamental than our food supply. Before founding an agricultural AI company, I worked on Capitol Hill as one of Congress’s first AI specialists, focused on national competitiveness and foreign control of strategic industries. Washington has learned, often too late, that strategic industries must be secured early through investment in competitive domestic innovators.
We learned that lesson with semiconductors. Decades of offshoring created a dangerous dependence on foreign chip production. Correcting that mistake has cost billions of dollars and years of effort. Policymakers recognized the problem only after it became a crisis. Agricultural AI is at a similar inflection point, except we are still early enough to change the outcome.
The U.S. has the ingredients to lead: land-grant universities, federal research institutions, capital markets, entrepreneurial talent, and a long history of agricultural innovation. From George Washington’s 16-sided barn to John Deere’s original steel plow and modern tools such as GPS-guided precision farming, America has led in agricultural innovation for the last 250 years. To continue this trend and ensure the U.S. leads AI’s integration into agriculture, it now needs policy that takes the moment seriously before it is too late.
The 2026 Farm Bill is that opportunity. Last week’s Senate hearing on expanding domestic consumption of American-grown agricultural products is moving us in the right direction, but this direction needs to be reflected in policy. Current precision agriculture provisions written without guardrails for foreign-controlled platforms could be deeply counterproductive, using U.S. taxpayer dollars to subsidize the very dependency this country cannot afford to create. American entrepreneurs are already building alternative, domestically integrated farm management tools and AI analysis layers with built-in data sovereignty from the ground up. It now needs to be backed up and scaled.
Congress should hear from and work with those builders when crafting the precision agriculture provisions of the 2026 Farm Bill, not just from legacy multinationals with global supply chains and foreign ownership structures. The independent entrepreneurs building domestically have both the expertise and the incentive to get it right. The only thing that would stop us is:
1. Passing a farm bill that fails to prioritize incentives for using domestically built AI software for precision ag; and
2. Passing a farm bill that forgets to include guardrails on foreign-controlled platforms.
HEMP INDUSTRY BRACES FOR UPHEAVAL THANKS TO LITTLE-NOTICED BUDGET PROVISION
AI platforms tailored for agriculture and the systems of record they are built on will become an invaluable intelligence layer for the American food system, leading to greater sustainability, efficiency, and effectiveness.
The question is whether we build it here, or wake up one day to find we have imported a dependency from foreign adversaries that control the data, the decisions, and the destiny of a food supply we cannot afford to lose.
Colin Raby is a former Congressional Artificial Intelligence Specialist. He’s the current CEO and co-founder of FarmMind, an agricultural artificial intelligence company focused on providing modern AI-enabled ag intelligence tools for growers and ag pros that advance domestic food production.