An AI tool that answers questions about gardening, farming, food, family, and community from Cooperative Extension publications, and links the pages it used.
Every question is searched against a library of Cooperative Extension publications — the research-based material land-grant universities publish for the public. The assistant writes its answer from the passages that search returns and cites them with numbered markers, so each claim leads back to a page you can read yourself. Nothing is answered from the open web.
It is still a language model, and language models get things wrong. Treat an answer as a place to start, and check the cited sources before acting on anything that matters — a pesticide rate, a food-safety step, a planting decision.
Asking needs no account. Signing up keeps a history of your conversations, lets you favorite sources, and lets you set a home state so answers favor research from your own state's Extension service.
Questions and the answers they got are kept, so we can see what people are asking and make the tool better at answering it. That includes questions asked without an account: those are stored with no name, email or account attached — only a random identifier for the browser they came from — and are read by the people who run the tool, not shared or sold. Signing in links your questions to your account, which is what lets you come back to them.
extensionbot.org is a project of the Extension Foundation. More about the tool, including how it is built and who to contact, is on the Foundation's site: extension.org/tools/extbot.