Can AI Actually Help Me Make Smarter Farm Decisions?
What if you could give AI years of your farm’s data and ask it to challenge the decisions you’re making?
Joe Dykhuis, President at Dykhuis Farms in Hamilton, Michigan, took that question seriously.
After Chad Fiechter challenged the idea that AI would change much about farm management, Joe decided to build his own farm-management AI tool using Purdue farm management materials and Dykhuis Farms' production and financial data.
What happened next surprised Chad and Todd.
Joe explains how AI challenged assumptions in a major capital investment decision, acted as an “adversarial checker,” and analyzed about 10 years of hog-loading data in minutes. It also identified patterns involving weather, cleanout timing, labor and logistics that would have taken far more time to uncover using traditional analysis.
AI is only as useful as the data, context and management fundamentals behind it.
Joe, Chad and Todd talk about what this means for farmers, where AI can actually save time, why “truth sources” matter, and whether the future of farm decision-making might be less about building the perfect spreadsheet and more about building your own tools as you need them.
This isn't a conversation about replacing farm managers with AI. It’s about whether AI can become another tool that helps farmers ask better questions, examine their assumptions and make more informed decisions.
In this episode:
How Joe built an AI tool around real farm data
Using AI to challenge a major capital investment decision
What 10 years of hog-load data revealed
Why good data and farm-management fundamentals still matter
How AI can connect information that wasn't originally collected for analysis
What farmers should think about before turning AI loose on their own data
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