A Chinese farmer followed AI herbicide advice and lost 25 acres of sesame overnight

AI farming advice cost a Chinese farmer 25 acres of sesame in a single night.

A year of good answers, then one bad one

Wu, 67, from Chuzhou in Anhui province, had been asking an AI app about his fields for roughly a year. Fertilizer timing, weather, pests: the answers were useful enough that he stopped double-checking them.

On July 10, 2026 he followed the app’s herbicide recipe and sprayed 150 mu, about 25 acres, of sesame seedlings. The next morning the field was dead.

Why the advice killed the crop

Agricultural experts who reviewed the case explained the failure precisely. The recommended herbicide is used against broadleaf weeds in soybean fields. Sesame is a broadleaf plant too, so the crop died along with the weeds. The chemical was also formulated for targeted spraying, not blanket application across an entire field, so the recipe was wrong twice over: wrong crop, wrong method.

The app’s side of the ledger is thin. It carried only a general warning that AI answers may be wrong. After the incident, its support team acknowledged the system has no verified agronomic database behind it and advised farmers to check with local agricultural technicians first. That guidance arrived after the field was gone. The story was reported by CTWANT and picked up by Tom’s Hardware and Futurism.

The trust curve problem

The uncomfortable mechanic here is that the damage was caused by the app being good, not bad. A year of correct answers about fertilizer and pests is exactly what trained Wu to stop verifying, which is exactly what made the one wrong answer expensive. If the app had been unreliable from the start, he would still have been calling the local technician.

That pattern generalizes well beyond farming. Any AI system that is right most of the time steadily erodes the checking behavior that catches the times it is wrong, and the cost of the miss tends to scale with how much trust preceded it. A generic “answers may be wrong” disclaimer does not interrupt that curve. Twenty-five acres of dead sesame is what the end of it looks like.