AI to Help Farmers Navigate Government Support
Scientists at HSE University – Perm are developing a smart navigator that will help farmers choose the most advantageous forms of government support for agricultural businesses.
Agriculture receives government support in virtually every developed country, although the specific tools and approaches vary depending on the economic model, the level of agricultural development and each country's foreign-trade relationships. The agricultural sector is always exposed to natural disasters and global market conditions, making government support essential to maintaining food security. Government support helps farmers reduce the risks of crop failures, secure stable financing for seasonal operations and continue investing in modernization even when losses occur. Subsidies can also indirectly help regulate prices for essential food products.
AI Analysis of Government Programs
In Russia, government support comes in many forms and is often combined into different packages, making it difficult for farmers to navigate. They can access a wide range of subsidies and benefits, including direct cash payments, such as payments based on the volume of output or the area under cultivation; interest-rate subsidies on loans; subsidized agricultural insurance; funding for the adoption of innovative technologies and research; reimbursement of part of the cost of seeds; and partial compensation for land-reclamation projects. Regional governments often develop their own packages of support measures for the agricultural sector.
For owners of small farms without experienced economists on staff, working through the documents and regulatory requirements can be particularly difficult. Digital technologies can help analyze the available programs and identify the forms of support that best fit a particular operation.
From August 20 to 21, Perm hosted the second Perm Future Cities Development Forum. There, researchers from the International Laboratory for Economics of Intangible Assets at HSE University – Perm, part of the National Research University Higher School of Economics, met with Anna Bykova, Minister of Agriculture and Agro-Industrial Complex of the Perm Region, and Olga Chebunina, CEO of Agropromtsifra JSC, a company designated as the sole supplier of solutions for the Russian Ministry of Agriculture for the development and operation of government information systems. Experts and agricultural-market participants discussed the AI Navigator for Government Support Measures for the Agricultural Sector, a project being developed by the laboratory's team.
Personalized Approach to Subsidies
As Pyotr Parshakov, head of the International Laboratory for Economics of Intangible Assets, noted, his team assembled a database while developing the AI navigator, containing more than 3,000 regulatory acts and covering all 89 regions of Russia.
The platform's key feature is that, instead of requiring farmers to search through lists of subsidies and regulatory documents, it will offer fast, personalized selection of support measures. In a dialogue window, a user can describe the specifics of their business. The neural network will then clarify the relevant parameters, identify current documents, match the eligibility requirements for subsidies and provide a detailed answer with references to the applicable regulations.
The criteria-extraction and semantic-search modules are now in place, while developers are continuing to fine-tune the language model. In the longer term, the AI system is expected to become the foundation of a specialized expert platform to support decision-making by agricultural producers.
“For the agricultural sector, this is a highly practical question: where is an algorithm already capable of making a better decision than a human, and where are accumulated experience, professional expertise and the responsibility of a specialist still critically important?” Olga Chebunina said.
A Unified Digital Navigator
The new digital platform is expected to allow farmers to quickly navigate an ever-changing body of regulatory documents. That would reduce the time farmers spend searching for appropriate support programs and help them launch new projects that supply food to people across Russia more quickly.
“It is important to us that our partnerships with technology partners, including Agropromtsifra, continue to grow stronger. This creates new opportunities to improve the efficiency of the sector,” said Anna Bykova, Minister of Agriculture and Agro-Industrial Complex of the Perm Region.
Over time, the smart navigator could conduct preliminary checks to determine whether a farm meets the eligibility criteria for subsidies. Working with regulatory information, the neural network would compare the details in a user's request with the relevant documents and explain which support measures apply to that particular user. At the same time, the neural network would help prepare the required package of documents.
In the future, the AI navigator is expected to be integrated into the Unified Digital Platform for the Agricultural and Fisheries Complexes, which would connect all federal government information systems and serve as a single entry point for users of the Russian Ministry of Agriculture's information systems. The Unified Digital Platform is being built around AI technologies and is expected to make it easier for farmers to work with existing federal information systems and government agencies. The AI Navigator for Government Support Measures for the Agricultural Sector is expected to become an important part of this broader digital platform for Russian agriculture.
