Tools like ChatGPT offer farmers a way to save time and resources on business marketing
Marketing is one of the least loved and most time-intensive tasks for many direct-to-consumer farms. Maintaining an active online presence requires a significant investment in communication via social media, newsletters, websites, email and keeping various profiles updated. But this time spent connecting with customers online often pays off, as research shows that using digital tools can lead to substantial improvements in both operational efficiency and market presence.
So how can New Hampshire farmers balance the need to serve as a grower, milker, mechanic, accountant, salesperson and marketing specialist all in one day? Generative AI tools offer huge time saving solutions by creating customized, relevant content with minimal effort and helping bring efficiency to routine customer communication.
What is Generative AI?
Generative AI is a form of artificial intelligence that creates new content — such as text, images or other data — based on patterns learned from extensive datasets. This technology has seen significant advancements in recent years, making it increasingly accessible and applicable to diverse industries, including agriculture.
A Focus on ChatGPT
ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is a text-based generative AI tool capable of generating human-like responses, assisting with creative tasks, answering questions and drafting content. This is a dramatic advancement from AI tools that we are used to like RE-captcha and Spotify playlist suggestions. For farmers, this means ChatGPT can assist with tasks like writing social media posts, answering frequently asked questions and brainstorming ideas for newsletters or marketing materials. This can be especially helpful for small, direct-to-consumer operations, where farmers have the most to gain from increasing the efficiency of tasks like content creation and customer engagement.
Use Cases and Practical Examples for You
Content Creation for Social Media and Newsletters:
Example: You have a blueberry farm in northern New Hampshire and use ChatGPT to generate social media posts inviting visitors to a seasonal berry-picking event. You enter a detailed prompt like, “Write a friendly Facebook post inviting families to our blueberry-picking event this Saturday in the White Mountains, including the following details on time, pricing, family-friendly activities and tips for the best picking…” In seconds, ChatGPT generates a response with a draft post that conveys event details in a warm tone, significantly reducing time spent writing the first draft of that content. You can even save your farm’s details (address, crops, ideal customers) in your profile to reduce the amount of time you spend typing these details into the tool.
Generating Market Day Announcements from a Harvest Log:
Example: You’re preparing for a weekend farmers’ market and use ChatGPT to turn a list of available produce from your harvest log into a social media update. By entering a prompt like, “Create an enticing Instagram post for my farm announcing what customers can find at our farmers’ market booth this Saturday, including all of the following items...” ChatGPT can quickly transform the list into a polished, engaging post. You can even attach a photo of the pick sheet and have ChatGPT pull out the text of the items on the list from the photo!
It's also important to note that while ChatGPT and other AI Tools can produce helpful content and ideas, the information that is produced needs to be fact-checked. It can and does just make stuff up! For this reason, the best use case for these tools is for questions that have no one right answer. Leave math and science to the calculators (that includes recipes!) and focus on using these Generative AI tools for word processing and generating. It is important to review and edit the content for accuracy, clarity and consistency.
Getting Started
Accessing ChatGPT:
Farmers can access ChatGPT via OpenAI’s platform. You can access the tool in a web browser or on an app for your phone. The relevant subscription options currently available as of November 2024 are:
- Free Tier: Provides access to GPT-4o mini with standard voice mode. While some features are limited, this tier is ideal for those just getting started and will be the only tool many folks ever need.
- ChatGPT Plus: Priced at $20 per month, offering extended limits on messaging, file uploads, advanced data analysis, image generation and access to GPT-4o, o1, and o1-mini models. Ideal for users needing reliable access and advanced capabilities or those who start to run into daily limits.
Prompting Basics:
While these tools can do amazing things, without being given detailed prompts and specific feedback, they often create content that feels canned. It takes some effort to “converse” with the tool to get the content that fits your farm brand. This iterative process can feel foreign at first because we have been trained to interact with online tools such as Google Search much differently.
ChatGPT vs. Google Search:
Prompting in ChatGPT requires a different approach from traditional search engines. Google Search is optimized for specific keyword searches to find external information, so the fewest number of words is often best. ChatGPT relies on well-phrased prompts to generate new content or respond contextually, based on its training. For example, “Write a post inviting families to our pumpkin-picking event…” will yield a more relevant response than “pumpkin-picking event information.”
Source : unh.edu