Problem
General agronomic knowledge is abundant. A smallholder’s problem is specific: this soil, this week’s rain, these symptoms on these leaves. Grafting the general onto the specific is the job, and the dangerous part is confident advice on a diagnosis the system isn’t sure about, for a crop someone’s income depends on.
System
rootstock ask "long straight grey marks on the lower leaves of my maize" --location "Kitale, Kenya" runs the pipeline: structure the description, fetch the soil profile and recent weather for the location, compute what those conditions actually imply (not just fetch them), retrieve guidance filtered to crop and conditions, write an answer where every sentence cites a specific numbered claim, then run a final decision: answer, or hand off to an extension officer.
Worth knowing
The hand-off decision is the point of the project. Most advisory agents optimize for always having an answer. Rootstock treats “possibly grey leaf spot, but northern leaf blight presents similarly and I can’t distinguish them from a description; here’s how to tell, and here’s who to call” as a successful output, because for the farmer it is one.