Seeing is Believing: Behavioural Profiling and AI Previews to Build Trust in Pest Management Tools

Although digital tools exist to help farmers reduce pesticide use, many UK smallholders still avoid them. This project focuses on one such tool: IPM Decisions, a pan-European platform offering real-time pest forecasts to support Integrated Pest Management (IPM). Despite its scientific value, smallholder farmers often find these tools hard to trust, confusing to explore, or irrelevant to their day-to-day needs. In collaboration with ADAS and DEFRA, this project asks: Can we make decision-support tools more appealing by showing farmers what they missed? We will co-design a simple “preview tool” that uses open-access pest data to show what the past season’s pest risks looked like for a given crop and location. The tool will also let users “play” with basic settings, like adjusting spray dates, to explore how different decisions might have changed outcomes. This interactive feature is designed to build confidence, curiosity, and trust without needing a full account or training. Working closely with smallholders, we will test whether this low-effort, gamified insight improves trust, understanding, and willingness to use the full platform. A hands-on workshop will test the prototype with different types of users (e.g. tech-sceptical, cautious, overwhelmed), and the findings will inform policy and design improvements. By combining behavioural science and AI-driven personalisation, this project will help bridge the gap between innovation and adoption, making sustainable farming tools more useful, usable, and used by the people who need them most.