Artificial intelligence is about to become the most valuable tool in American agriculture. The question is who builds it, who controls it, and whether the United States will lead or hand another strategic industry to a foreign adversary.

At this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Jeff Rowe, CEO of foreign-controlled Syngenta Group, argued in an essay that AI can combine farm data and agronomic expertise to transform agriculture. His piece raised the question of how AI could be used to reduce the complexity growers face every day: soil tests, field notes, water decisions, and input records. He also noted that 160,000 U.S. farms have disappeared since 2017, and wrote that “resilience and innovation” is “needed now more than ever” to reverse that trend.