How Rare Uses Agentforce to Deliver AI Farming Coaching to 100,000 Smallholders via WhatsApp

Rare is a conservation nonprofit whose approach runs on behavioral science: instead of telling communities what to do, Rare helps people discover motivations to change their own behaviors around farming, fishing, and land use. The organisation works across multiple geographies with small-scale farmers and fishers who are often in remote areas with limited connectivity and no reliable access to agronomic expertise.

With a global team of only 300 people supporting operations across multiple countries, Rare's challenge was the ratio problem: the organisation could not hire enough field staff to give every farmer the kind of one-to-one coaching that actually changes practice. A field officer typically manages relationships with dozens of farmers across a wide geographic area — which means each farmer gets limited touchpoints per season, and the quality of guidance depends heavily on the individual officer's expertise and bandwidth.

Rare built Agent Tierra, an AI coaching agent powered by Salesforce Agentforce, delivered through WhatsApp — the communication channel that already exists on the phones of the farmers Rare works with. Agent Tierra draws on a profile built from 300+ data points per farmer, real-time local weather conditions, and aggregated peer insights from across the farming community to give each farmer personalised guidance on soil health, crop management, agrochemical reduction, and climate adaptation. The agent does not give generic advice; it grounds every response in the specific farmer's situation, crop type, location, and current conditions.

The pilot results are striking for a nonprofit technology deployment. 100% of surveyed farmers said they would use Agent Tierra again — voluntary adoption with full intent to continue. The agent resolved 97% of queries autonomously without escalating to a human. Field teams project they will gain 40% more time for high-impact, relationship-based work by offloading routine guidance to the agent. And Rare's stated goal is to reach 100,000 farmers within two years, a scale that would be impossible with field staff alone.

Underpinning Agent Tierra is a unified Salesforce CRM that connects Rare's farmer data, grant management workflows, fundraising operations, and field team coordination in one platform — replacing the fragmented system landscape that previously prevented the organisation from seeing a complete picture of its impact across regions.