The Nogoyá agronomist who taught a machine to hold 23-plus years of his own judgment
Nogoyá, Entre Ríos, Argentina
Published August 13, 2026
An Argentine agronomist spent 23-plus years reading his own land, then built an AI system that can answer like he would, long after he's gone.
The story
The person and the place
Diego Álvarez is an agronomic engineer who works his family's land in Nogoyá, a farming town in Argentina's Entre Ríos province.
The problem he cared about
For more than 23 years he had been reading his own fields: when to plant, how a given plot handles a dry year, which rotation saves it in a wet one. None of it was written down anywhere but his head.
The agency moment
So Álvarez started entering it himself, the rainfall logs, yield sheets, and planting records, into ChatGPT. Then, working with a technology partner rather than waiting for an agtech company to build it for him, he trained the system on the judgment calls themselves, the season-by-season reads on this exact ground that only someone who had worked it for decades would know how to make.
What changed
The system grew into six named AI agents, among them a climate agent and an administration agent, that now handle invoices and receipts he used to process by hand and offer crop recommendations grounded in his own 23-plus years of calls. By his own count, it freed up at least an hour a day, a tally that's his, not an auditor's.
The move worth copying
Álvarez didn't wait for an agtech company to solve this for him. He wrote down what only he knew, until a system could answer his own questions back. If you're the one holding years of judgment that has never made it onto paper, that's the version of this worth trying. Know someone carrying expertise like that? Feed the scout at goodinprogress.org.
"El día de mañana, si mis hijos deciden sembrar el campo, pueden entrar, consultar y les va a contestar como si fuera yo" ("The day my children decide to farm the land, they can go in, ask, and it will answer them as if it were me.") — Diego Álvarez, Elonce
Verified sources
Sources
Here is where this story came from. Go read the originals.
Sources last verified August 13, 2026.