Agent Tierra: Trusted guidance in farmers’ hands | Rare

Supporting the farmers who feed the world

Around the world, more than 600 million family farms underpin food security, sustain rural economies, and support billions of livelihoods. Despite living and working on the frontlines of climate change, smallholder farmers, who produce roughly one-third of the world’s food, often don’t receive the support and technical assistance they need despite the critical role they play.

Agent Tierra is Rare’s AI-powered virtual extension agent, co-designed with farmers to deliver trusted, personalized regenerative agriculture guidance through WhatsApp, combining agronomic knowledge, localized climate information, and behavioral insights.

“Using AI, low-income farmers will soon be able to get better advice about all these things than even the richest farmers get today and increase their output substantially.”

– Bill Gates

Deploying AI for good

Smallholder farmers make consequential decisions every day: how to restore soil, prepare for changing weather, manage pests, reduce costs, and maintain production without degrading the land on which they depend.

At a moment when only a fraction of farmers are receiving technical assistance they need, Agent Tierra is an example of deploying artificial intelligence for the benefit people and nature. Using WhatsApp — a familiar tool already in the hands of many farmers — it provides practical guidance in accessible language, tailored to farmers’ crops, location, and needs.

Working with Salesforce’s Agentforce platform, Rare designed Agent Tierra to use farmers’ unique situations to provide advice tailored to their exact conditions and in their preferred language.  

Read Salesforce: Rare puts crop-specific advice in each farmer’s pocket with agentic coaching

Built with farmers, not just for them

In designing Agent Tierra, Rare began by listening to farmers. Bringing their lived reality to the design process, farmers have helped shape its language, recommendations, response length, and user experience through testing and feedback. Their input has led to clearer, more concise answers and informed the development of capabilities such as image-based diagnostics for crop pests and diseases.

Rare’s behavioral science expertise is integrated into the tool’s design. Timely prompts, motivational messages, and social-norm cues help farmers move from receiving information to confidently adopting regenerative practices. Digital-literacy training also helps farmers build the skills and comfort needed to use AI effectively.

“Agent Tierra is helping transform the way smallholder farmers in our region make decisions.”

Juan Carlos Mendoza, Mayor of Granada, Colombia

This farmer-centered approach is essential to building trust. Working alongside farmers, Rare’s believes in letting the communities lead. Core to the approach is enabling Profes, farmers who are becoming experts in regenerative agriculture and are trusted leaders among their peers.

Why start with Colombia?

Colombia is one of the most biodiverse countries on Earth. In the Orinoquía and Amazon regions, smallholder farmers cultivate cacao, coffee, and other crops in landscapes that support extraordinary plant and animal life.

However, decades of armed conflict have displaced families, disrupted rural livelihoods, and weakened the systems that once connected farmers to technical support. Today, farmers face a multifaceted challenge — increasingly unpredictable weather, rising production costs, and pressure to expand agriculture into vulnerable ecosystems — all with limited support.

Learn more about Rare’s work in Colombia

Rare in Colombia

Scaling people-powered solutions

Rare’s 2030 Strategy recognizes that community-led solutions must reach far more people and places to meet the scale of today’s climate and biodiversity challenges. Agent Tierra supports that ambition by helping make regenerative agriculture knowledge timely, accessible, and affordable — without diminishing the leadership of farmers or the importance of human relationships.

It also demonstrates how Rare can combine community knowledge, behavioral science, technology, local government leadership, and strategic partnerships to remove barriers to action. As Rare learns from farmers in Colombia, the long-term goal is to adapt Agent Tierra for additional landscapes, crops, and countries.

Scaling Agent Tierra is not simply about reaching more users. It is about helping more farmers restore their land, strengthen their livelihoods, manage climate risks, and lead the transition to regenerative agriculture.

AI for people and nature

Rare approaches artificial intelligence as a practical tool for advancing community-led conservation and climate resilience — not as an end in itself. AI should amplify human potential, strengthen local decision-making, and put useful information into the hands of people closest to environmental challenges.

Rare’s approach includes clear guardrails, human oversight, validated information, testing for bias, responsible-use training, and early collaboration with communities and partners. Across Rare’s work, AI is also helping translate environmental data into forecasts for fishing communities, strengthen fisheries enforcement, elevate community perspectives, and support local climate-adaptation planning.