About

What the consortium is

AI AgriBench is a public benchmarking consortium created to evaluate the accuracy, relevance and practical usefulness of AI-powered advisory services for agriculture. It provides a transparent, expert-reviewed benchmark grounded in real-world agronomy and farm-management questions drawn from land-grant university extension publications, assesses public chatbots and AI-based advisory systems using curated field-level scenarios, and reports results through a public leaderboard.

Origin

The benchmarking methodology originates in research conducted within the CropWizard project of the AIFARMS National AI Institute. The Center for Digital Agriculture announced the initiative in March 2025; the current consortium launched on 28 January 2026.

Who leads it

The Center for Digital Agriculture (CDA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign leads the consortium. A neutral host matters: a land-grant university research centre, not a vendor, decides what gets measured and how.

Governance

A Steering Committee of academic, industry and nonprofit representatives governs the consortium, with working committees reporting to it — including the Communications & Outreach Committee, whose remit covers messaging, media, website content and stakeholder engagement, and explicitly excludes technical benchmark development and scientific validation.

See governance for the conflict-of-interest and corrections policies.

Steering Committee

TODO (Committee): a Person entry for each member, with name, title, organisation and a two-to-three sentence bio, marked up with Person and memberOf schema. Organisations represented include UIUC, Bayer, John Deere, Microsoft, Taranis, KissanAI, Digital Green, Precision Development, the Extension Foundation and independent advisors.

Funding

Funders to date: AIFARMS, the Center for Digital Agriculture, and the Gates Foundation.

Contact

Media enquiries and general questions: aiagribench@lists.illinois.edu.