Artificial Intelligence in the Field: Exploring Innovation and Ethics with Professor Chad Fiechter

Episode 43 | Today, Katie Olthoff of the Meat Success Podcast interviews Purdue agricultural economics, professor Chad Fiechter about practical, responsible use of generative AI in agriculture and small businesses. Fiechter describes adoption ranging from “Google Plus” style queries to farmers building custom web apps, and emphasizes using AI as an iterative thought partner rather than an answer machine. They discuss risks of sharing sensitive data, the importance of reading platform terms, and how paid/organizational accounts can limit model training via privacy settings. To guard against hallucinations, Fiechter recommends requesting sources, verifying with multiple external references, and matching skepticism to the stakes. He encourages transparency about AI use, owning outputs as the author, using adversarial prompts and cross-checking with other models, and providing strong context/examples to improve results, especially for marketing and management tasks. Connect with Chad here: https://ag.purdue.edu/commercialag/ho... 01:17 Chad’s Journey from the farm to Purdue 03:19 How Farms Use AI Today 05:05 Building Custom AI Tools 10:44 Iterating Like a Pro 12:50 Data Privacy and Paid Plans 16:48 Hallucinations and Verification 23:18 Owning AI Output 29:14 Adversarial Prompts and Model Battles 37:21 AI as Small Business Coach 41:24 Give AI Better Context And learn more about ChopLocal and ChopLocal University Below! https://choplocal.com/ https://www.choplocaluniversity.com/