Communicating Agriculture AI Technologies: How American Agricultural Producers’ Perception of Trustworthiness, Risk Perception, and Emotion Affect Their Likelihood of Adopting Artificial Intelligence in Food Systems

The recent decade has witnessed a rise in novel agriculture AI technologies in the USA to improve productivity and sustainability in food systems. However, there lacks scholarship that investigates how agricultural producers, one of the most important stakeholders in this technological development, perceive the risks of and their trustworthiness in these emerging technologies. We addressed this knowledge gap by surveying a diverse producer population across the United States (N = 132). We found a positive association between producers’ trustworthiness and their likelihood of adopting certain emerging technologies. Moreover, the more these producers feel a technology is worth the various costs, the higher likelihood they will adopt the technology. These findings provide practical lessons for how to communicate novel food production technologies to this crucial stakeholder and how to implement a user-centered technology design.