FoA 361: Meet Norm, FBN's AI-Powered Ag Advisor with Kit Barron and Charles Baron

Find out how Calgary is leading the agribusiness revolution: www.CalgaryAgbusiness.com

Norm: https://www.fbn.com/norm

Farmers Business Network: https://www.fbn.com/

Today's episode features Kit Barron and Charles Baron of Farmers Business Network. However, today's episode is not about Kit or Charles as much as it is about Norm, FBN's AI-powered Ag advisor tool that they launched just weeks ago, but already has me fascinated about the potential impact on the future of agriculture.

Charles has been on the podcast before, but it was clear back on episode 75, which aired in October of 2017. In that episode he provided a lot of the basics of Farmers Business Network which was founded in 2014, and is best known as a farmer-to-farmer network and e-commerce platform. 

Kit Barron has worked with farm data for a very long time with familiar names such as The Climate Corporation and FarmTogether. He now serves as the Head of Data Science and Analytics for FBN. 

Charles, Kit and I talk a lot about Norm, the potential for artificial intelligence to provide useful advice for farmers, and what this means for agtech in the future. Like do we need API’s for example as data pipelines if we can train AI’s to go get the data we need. It really presents a lot of interesting questions about the future of agriculture. Questions Norm and others will someday be able to answer. 

Be sure to stick around for the end of today’s episode where you’ll hear Kit, Charles and I come up with the idea to have Norm write a script for a potential intro to this podcast episode, then I give that script to another AI tool called Descript which generates an audio of that script in my voice. I’ll be honest it’s a little spooky what’s possible, so stay tuned for that. 

To kick things off though, Charles is going to provide a little catch up since our last interview nearly six years ago. Then you’ll hear Kit’s voice describing more about Norm specifically.