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CropWizard

CropWizard is a cutting-edge AI agronomy assistant that answers agricultural questions with expert precision. It consults over 400,000 selected online publications, including Extension resources from US land-grant universities and a growing set of open-access research publications. It can be used as:

  • a "virtual agronomist" — to obtain farming advice;
  • a research assistant — to find the most relevant online publications for a topic of interest;
  • a search engine — to look up basic information about agriculture.

CropWizard is built on the Illinois Chat platform and is its flagship example of a large, specialized assistant.

Getting started

Enter a text question in the chat bar at the bottom of the Chat page and you'll receive a response within a few seconds. You can also upload one or more images and ask about them, or ask questions that trigger registered computational tools — tools are invoked automatically when relevant.

The tools functionality can also analyze your own data, including spreadsheets (CSV) and databases (SQL); this is preliminary — contact the team if you're interested.

Customizing user settings

  1. Account (optional) — click Login at the top right to sign in or create an account.
  2. New Chat — start a fresh conversation. Chat history from the current conversation (questions, images, answers) is included with every question posed to the LLM.
  3. Settings — customize:
    • LLM — which model answers your questions.
    • Temperature — 0 for precise, 1 for creative. The recommended default is 0.1, since the goal is reliable technical question-answering.
    • Document Groups — enable or disable categories of documents in the knowledge base (grouped by university for Extension documents, by publisher for research publications). "All Documents" is enabled by default.
    • Tools — enable or disable individual computational tools.
  4. Conversation history — previous questions are listed in the left pane; click one to re-enter it. You can clear the history or export it as JSON.

Text questions and references

Responses cite reference numbers; click Sources at the bottom of a response to see the numbered reference list, where each entry links to the original online source. Depending on the question, CropWizard displays intermediate steps you can expand:

  • Optimized search query — for follow-up questions, an LLM compresses the combined history + question into an efficient search query.
  • Retrieved documents — how many relevant document chunks were included (always shown).
  • Routing to tools — which computational tools were deemed relevant (invoked in parallel).
  • Tool outputs — output from any invoked tools, combined with retrieved chunks and images for the final answer.
  • Final response — the answer, synthesizing the prompt, retrieved documents, and tool outputs.

CropWizard as a research assistant

Enter a research topic as your prompt; the cited source documents give you relevant material to explore in detail. Use follow-up questions to dig into facets of the topic — previous questions and answers are retained as context.

Example

Give me a detailed explanation of hairy vetch as a cover crop. Explain when it must be planted, what size range it grows to, how fast it grows to maturity, and the best ways to clear the field for planting in the next season.

Image questions

Upload images with the photo icon at the left of the chat bar and ask about them. For image questions, CropWizard additionally shows an Image description step — an LLM-generated description of the image contents, which is also used to search the knowledge base.

Tool questions

Upload pest images and ask a question; the AI automatically invokes the relevant tools, such as the Pest Detection tool. Tool inputs and outputs (text and images) are displayed as steps and folded into the final answer. See Tools & Workflows for how tools work platform-wide.

Example questions

What are the best practices for crop rotation in corn production?

How can I manage pests in my soybean field?

What are the nutrient requirements for wheat during the growing season?

How do I improve soil fertility with cover crops?

What irrigation techniques work best in drought-prone areas?

Funding and acknowledgements

CropWizard is a research project launched as part of AIFARMS, the national AI institute for agriculture, funded by USDA NIFA under award number 2020-67021-32799. Additional funding comes from Intel Corporation, Amazon AWS through the Amazon-Illinois Center on AI for Conversational Experiences (AICE), and the University of Illinois system through the Discovery Partners Institute Science program.

CropWizard is built on the Illinois Chat platform, funded by the NCSA Center for AI Innovation (CAII), the Office of the CIO of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the Healthcare Innovation Office at NCSA, and the Gies College of Business, among others.