Growing with AI Initiative
Innovation for Washington Agriculture in the Age of AI
Washington’s farms are facing real and urgent challenges, and Your IDEAS CAN HELP.
Over the past year, WSAS has led a collaborative initiative to define key challenges that need to be addressed to keep Washington’s agriculture and food systems robust – with a focus on potential benefits and risks of artificial intelligence. Now, through our first-ever open Call for Ideas, we are surfacing promising ideas that could help Washington agriculture become more productive, resilient, and economically viable in the age of AI. Perhaps you have developed an innovation that could be scaled, seen something work elsewhere that could apply here, or have an idea for a technology, research project, or practice, that could advance solutions to these challenges.
Promising ideas will be elevated and connected to potential collaborators (researchers, producers, policymakers, industry leaders and funders) who can help advance them. Ideas with the strongest potential for impact will receive cash prizes of up to $2,000 and be featured at the WSAS Innovation Showcase on October 8, 2026.
Deadline to submit is Friday, September 4!
A Critical Time for Innovation
For generations, Washington farmers have been pioneers and national leaders in agricultural productivity and diversity, with 300+ commodities and a production value of $12.9 billion built on ingenuity and resilience. Today, that resilience is being tested: the state lost more than 3,700 farms between 2017 and 2022 (an average of two a day) and in 2024 ranked last in the nation for farm profitability, with operators collectively losing $295 million.
Today’s producers are facing unprecedented and compounding pressures:
- Water is less reliable. Four consecutive drought emergencies since 2023 have cut supplies in key growing regions, particularly the Yakima Basin.
- Margins are inverting. Over the past decade, Washington’s farmers have watched their profit margins fall to the lowest in the country while their production costs climbed faster than anywhere else in the nation.
- Labor is scarcer and more expensive. Wages for seasonal agricultural workers rose 36% between 2018 and 2024 as the farm workforce shrinks.
- Complexity keeps compounding. Farmers navigate requirements from more than a dozen agencies while global competition squeezes already narrow margins.
These pressures are real and urgent. At the same time, artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly evolving, and its effects are already being felt in agriculture. This creates a window of opportunity, and Washington is uniquely positioned to lead: the state is home to world-class agricultural expertise and one of the nation’s foremost technology sectors. In agriculture, AI tools have the potential to sharpen decision-making, reduce costs, and help farmers navigate increasingly complex growing conditions and markets. But realizing that potential is not straightforward. AI tools must be designed and deployed thoughtfully, with attention to who benefits, who bears the risk, and what happens when systems fail. This necessitates approaches that maximize benefits while actively reducing harm.
Call for Ideas
To better understand how AI might impact agriculture, the Washington State Academy of Sciences (WSAS) offered an online webinar series and convened a workshop in April 2026 that brought together more than 50 researchers, farmers, AI developers, policymakers, funders, and innovators. From those conversations emerged seven challenge areas that, if addressed, would help Washington agriculture become more productive, resilient, and economically viable in the age of AI:
Click on any challenge area above to explore the specific questions driving it and the kinds of ideas that would be valuable.
SUBMISSION DETAILS
If you care about the future of food production in Washington, this call is for you. We welcome ideas from individuals or teams of researchers, entrepreneurs, inventors, policy makers, agriculture workers, students, or anyone else with an idea that could benefit Washington. These challenges are too big and too complex for any single discipline or organization to solve alone. We are especially interested in ideas that bring unlikely collaborators together across disciplines, sectors, or communities. Must be over 18 to submit an idea.
We are looking for ideas related to AI: tools that use AI, approaches that incorporate AI into existing practices, or ideas that help farmers and communities reduce the risks that AI may create. We welcome ideas at any stage, from early concepts to works in progress to fully developed approaches. Your idea might be a technology, a research project, an education program, or a community initiative. It might address one challenge area or several.
The submission form will ask you to tell us about your idea, which challenge area(s) it speaks to, and a little about yourself and your team.
Submitting an idea to this call does not transfer any rights to WSAS. By submitting, you give us permission to share a description of your idea with WSAS-selected reviewers and, if selected as a finalist, to feature your idea in our final Growing with AI report, public communications including news releases, social media, and event programming. We will always attribute ideas to their submitters and will not share unpublished details beyond the review committee without your consent.
If you have concerns about sharing details of a proprietary technology or early-stage invention, you are welcome to describe your idea in general terms. The goal of this call is to identify promising ideas and connect people.
- Thursday, July 30: Call for Ideas opens
- Friday, September 4, 11:59pm: Submission deadline. Ideas submitted after this deadline will not be reviewed.
- October 8: Selected ideas presented at the WSAS Innovation Showcase in Seattle
What happens to your idea
Every idea submitted will be reviewed by a panel that includes researchers, growers, technologists, and state policy leaders invested in finding solutions to these challenges. All submissions will become part of a broader picture of what is possible for Washington agriculture and may be shared with WSAS networks working in this space. Ideas deemed most likely to have an impact for Washington agriculture will be:
- Awarded cash prizes of up to $2,000
- Invited to present their idea in person to leading scientists, policymakers, research institutions, and industry leaders at the WSAS Innovation Showcase on October 8 in Seattle
- Connected with potential collaborators who are actively seeking opportunities to support agricultural innovation
- Featured in a news release and content shared with local media and amplified through WSAS communications and networks
Submissions are open through Friday, September 4. Ideas submitted after this deadline will not be reviewed.
Questions? Reach out to WSAS Early Career Fellow Bianca Tejada.
Learning together
In winter 2026, WSAS hosted a webinar series that explored the future of Washington agriculture in the age of Artificial Intelligence. Webinar discussions served as a foundation of shared learning for a workshop among researchers, farmers, AI developers, policymakers, and innovators to further refine Washington’s opportunity space and catalyze new collaborations.
Core funds from the State of Washington supported this project
WEBINAR SERIES SUPPORTED BY
PLATINUM SPONSOR
GOLD SPONSORS
WSAS Board & Members
BRONZE SPONSORS
SUPPORTERS
