FarmerChat: AI advice for 2.2 million farmers, and the brand behind it

FarmerChat is an AI assistant that 2.2 million smallholder farmers across India, Africa and South America use to get answers about their crops and livestock, in their own languages. They can type, speak or snap a photo, and get practical advice shaped by local knowledge and local conditions.

Most farmers use FarmerChat on low-cost Android phones, often outdoors, sometimes with patchy connectivity and limited literacy. So the app is built around one composer that takes a photo, a voice note or typed words, a home feed of advice for your farm today, and answers that read like a knowledgeable neighbour.

Behind it is an agentic design system. It started in Figma, the usual way: colours, type, components and spacing rules. Now AI agents work from it directly, building screens in code from the same tokens and components, and writing changes back to Figma when the library needs to catch up. Design and engineering share one vocabulary, and we move a lot faster.

The app sits inside a bigger change. Digital Green has spent eighteen years helping farmers learn from each other, and I also led the reboot of its brand and website around that shift. The idea was simple: AI doesn’t have to look like “AI.” No glowing gradients or chrome robots, just the green Digital Green already owned, made brighter, a plain wordmark that works like a flag, Figtree for the type, real farmers in every photo, and a Green Mode in place of dark mode.