Ireland’s farming communities hold a vast store of living knowledge — but right now, that knowledge is fragmented across paperwork, memory, siloed systems, and endless logins.
At the same time, farmers face rising demands for compliance, while trying to make smart choices around markets, schemes, and sustainability — all with minimal time and minimal tools.
This pilot aims to flip that reality by giving farmers a system that works for them. We’re inviting 10 dairy farmers to help us trial a new kind of digital assistant: a local, chat-based AI that lives on a small device in the farmer’s home, not in some faraway cloud.
Through simple daily chats on Telegram, this assistant will start to build a dynamic model of each farm — capturing useful context, nudging for missing info, and learning how best to help with three key things:
Compliance (reminders + automated logging)
Market (matching produce to opportunities)
Schemes (finding and applying for grants or supports that fit the farmer’s current state)
But this is bigger
than one farm.
This pilot is part of a long-term vision to rebuild a locally owned, non-extractive digital infrastructure for Irish agriculture — where every farm builds its own intelligent data model, and these can connect to form a decentralised network of rural intelligence. We believe this could create a smarter, more circular food system — where rural data serves rural communities first, driving investment, infrastructure, and prosperity from the ground up.
By participating in this pilot, Macra and its members are helping shape a tool built with and for farmers — not for tech companies or state agencies. The long-term potential is a nationwide network of self-aware, self-improving farms that are better equipped to respond to climate change, market shifts, and regulatory pressures — while restoring autonomy and value to the people working the land.