Precision Development (PxD) serves smallholder farmers in low- and middle-income countries by providing timely, accurate, and actionable agricultural information to improve their livelihoods. PxD focuses on delivering customized, real-time, data-driven advice to help farmers make informed decisions that enhance productivity, build resilience to climate change, and increase incomes. Its work is centered on meeting the specific needs of smallholder farmers, ensuring that the information provided is both practical and impactful.
Operating as both a direct service provider and an amplifier, PxD integrates its services into public agricultural extension systems through close collaboration with government partners. Over the past year, this approach has enabled PxD to reach more than 17 million farmers at scale. By working with local and national governments, NGOs, private organizations, and farmers’ groups, PxD ensures that its solutions are accessible, cost-effective, and scalable. Additionally, PxD enhances existing digital agriculture services by incorporating A/B testing, user feedback, and human-centered design. Its government advisory services further support national and sub-national governments in strengthening their digital agriculture ecosystems, improving digital public infrastructure, and adopting innovative technologies like AI.
Direct engagement with smallholder farmers is a cornerstone of PxD’s approach. Through digital platforms and field teams, PxD gathers feedback from farmers to refine and tailor its services, ensuring their relevance and effectiveness in diverse local contexts. By combining the strengths of its roles as a service provider and amplifier, PxD achieves a balance between scaling its impact and maintaining high-quality, evidence-based agricultural support. This dual approach enables PxD to deliver innovative solutions while fostering a feedback loop that drives continuous improvement and lasting benefits for millions of farmers.
Smallholder farmers often struggle to achieve their potential crop yields, harvesting only 30-50% of what is possible due to limited access to essential agricultural information and tools. While new technologies, such as stress-tolerant seeds, advanced weather forecasts, and pest prediction models, can significantly boost incomes and resilience to climate change, these resources remain out of reach for many poor farmers. The main challenge lies in the cost and complexity of gathering local data, understanding farmer-specific needs, and generating relevant, actionable advice in real time.
PxD envisions providing smallholder farmers with deeply localized, timely agricultural advice tailored to their unique conditions, such as rainfall patterns, soil types, and crop cycles. To achieve this at scale, PxD proposes using AI-driven tools, specifically large language models (LLMs), to process both static and real-time data and generate actionable recommendations for individual farmers. These advisories could be delivered via platforms like voice calls, SMS, and messaging apps, in the farmer’s preferred dialect and format. The system would also include features like real-time alerts (e.g., for weather or pest outbreaks) and multimedia content such as instructional images or videos, ensuring that the advice is clear and practical.
This AI-driven advisory system aims to close the feedback loop by incorporating farmer input to improve recommendations continuously. PxD has already seen promising results from weather advisory pilots in Pakistan and India, where forecasts have influenced farmer behaviors, helping them avoid fieldwork during extreme heat and optimize agricultural activities. By scaling these efforts and integrating AI, PxD aims to make customized, impactful advice accessible to millions of farmers, enabling them to better manage risks, invest in agriculture, and achieve greater productivity and resilience.
These are greenfield projects.