Editors' Notebook

Beginning this week, Progressive Farmer subscribers will receive the summer 2025 issue of the magazine in the mail. This special themed issue, "Labor Pains," focuses on the obstacles farmers, ranchers and agribusinesses of all kinds face in finding and retaining workers and the creative ways employers are coping with those challenges.

When examining the cover -- showing a farmer posting a Help Wanted sign against a backdrop of fields and grain bins -- you might not immediately notice anything unusual. But flip to page 1 to read the "On the Cover" note and you'll discover something unprecedented in our 139-year history: This cover was created almost entirely using artificial intelligence.

Progressive Farmer's cover has featured a wide variety of different types of images over the years. Those included hand-drawn or painted scenes of everyday farm and ranch life, photos taken by our award-winning photographers, and graphic and photo illustrations created by our talented designers. What all those images had in common was that they were created by a human hand ... gliding a pencil or paint brush across a blank canvas, snapping a camera shutter at just the right moment, or dragging and clicking a computer mouse across a desk while working in a photo-editing or graphic design program. Our latest cover, though, marks the first time that our cover image was created almost entirely by a computer program rather than a human being.

Why now? DTN/Progressive Farmer, like many organizations, is exploring how AI can enhance our ability to serve customers. Currently, our newsroom uses AI selectively -- for brainstorming ideas, suggesting headlines, analyzing data and occasionally rewriting news releases. Whenever AI plays a significant role in our published content, we transparently disclose this to readers.

Other DTN divisions are also exploring ways to harness AI's potential. Our weather division, for example, has developed AI-powered tropical storm forecast models that deliver warnings up to four days earlier than conventional methods. (You can read more about that here: https://www.dtn.com/….)

For our cover, we chose Adobe Firefly specifically because its AI models are trained "on content we have permission to use" -- an important ethical consideration for us as journalists who believe the work that writers, photographers and artists produce should only be used with their permission. According to Adobe, Firefly is part of the company's Creative Cloud. In addition to the application's ability to create images, audio and video, its generative AI models also power features in other Adobe applications, such as the Generative Fill tool in Adobe Photoshop. (You can learn more about Firefly here: https://firefly.adobe.com/….)

Creating the image required persistence. I entered several variations of the following prompt: "Graphic illustration of a modern farmer with a long-sleeve shirt, blue jeans and cap, attaching a rectangular blank sign to a fence post. In the background are green summer fields and a line of grain bins."

Generating an AI image with a text prompt is a bit like repeatedly pulling the lever of a slot machine: You never know exactly what combination you will land on. I ran my prompt through Firefly hundreds of times over several days, producing over 2,000 images before finally hitting the jackpot with an image suitable for our cover. Each attempt produced the requested elements but with wildly different details -- sometimes rendering the farmer in surrealist styles reminiscent of Dali or Picasso. That's a common phenomenon in AI-generated images, according to Progressive Farmer Production Manager/Editorial Barry Falkner, who helped with the final cover image.

"AI-generated images can produce areas in an image that don't look natural or are entirely wrong, which is called 'AI slop,' where words are misspelled, letters aren't recognizable, there are too many or too few fingers, there are extra or missing eyes, objects or people merge into each other, objects show up in the image that don't belong, etc.," Falkner explained. "These areas have to be touched up or removed in programs such as Adobe Photoshop." (You can see an extreme example of AI slop in the image accompanying this blog.)

The irony of using machine-generated art for an issue about labor challenges wasn't lost on us. Workers in many industries -- including journalism -- fear AI might eventually replace humans. Senior Machinery Editor Dan Miller explored that very issue in his article "The Autonomy Riddle" in the magazine. He talked to several producers, an ag economics professor and executives from some of the major ag equipment manufacturers for their insights on how they think intelligent technology will affect the ag workforce. Miller's sources consistently described these technologies as supplemental tools rather than replacements for human workers. One of his sources, North Dakota farmer Jared Billadeau, summarized it well: "I think autonomy is going to allow farms to grow and become more efficient, but you're still going to have people. There are other things to do on the farm that is not just running equipment."

Our experience confirmed this perspective. Altogether, I spent around 14-16 hours over several weeks running prompts through Firefly and carefully examining the details of each image before I finally reached an image that met all our criteria. Falkner then spent around four hours editing the image. That included fixing numerous small details, such as redrawing one of the farmer's hands and thumb that were originally melded with the Help Wanted sign and fencepost, adding color and text to the sign, attaching missing barbed wire to the fence and fixing inconsistencies in the background grass and grain bins.

Between prompt engineering, image selection and extensive editing, we invested approximately 20 hours of human work in this cover. That's perhaps a little less time than a human graphic designer would take to create the same image, but it is still a significant amount of work for human staff members. And unlike working with a human artist, we couldn't simply request specific adjustments to details.

Progressive Farmer editors and designers didn't take the decision to publish our first AI-generated cover lightly. We put a great deal of thought into our decision and debated the pros and cons of using a non-traditionally created image. Ultimately, our final decision was based on the fact that over the years, we have embraced new technologies on both our digital and print platforms with the goal of producing the highest-quality publications for our subscribers. Does this signal a permanent shift in our approach? No. The August issue will also feature a graphic illustration, but one created by a flesh-and-blood human being. But we learned valuable lessons about AI's potential and limitations that will inform our future work.

For better or worse, artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly integrated into our lives. At DTN/Progressive Farmer, we're committed to exploring responsible, ethical applications of this evolving technology that help us do our jobs better and that benefit our readers and their businesses.

To learn more about AI's potential, read DTN Editor Emeritus Urban Lehner's recent blog, "Seeing the Bright Side of Artificial Intelligence," here: https://www.dtnpf.com/….

Anthony Greder can be reached at anthony.greder@dtn.com

Follow him on social platform X @AGrederDTN

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