Plain English Guide
Farm Assistant — The Plain English Guide
Version 0.5 · in force from 10 September 2026
This guide explains, in plain English, what your Farm Assistant does, what it can't do, and how your information is handled. It is a summary. The full terms are in our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy — if anything here differs from those, those documents apply.
Part 1 — What your Assistant can and can't do
What it can do
- Organise your own information — notes, records, photos, documents you give it.
- Draft things for you — letters, reports, summaries, dashboards, spreadsheets.
- Look things up and lay them out — market prices, weather, product information, and other things you ask it to find.
- Learn from the Regen Library — discover practical methods contributed by other farmers and by specialists, so you're not starting from scratch.
- Take instructions by voice or text, and carry your farm's context from one conversation to the next.
What it can't do
- Give you professional advice. It is not your agronomist, vet, accountant, tax agent, lawyer, or the adviser you rely on for environmental compliance.
- Be your system of record. Your accounting, your compliance records and your official documents stay in your own systems.
- Make or authorise a payment or transaction. It is a breach of the Terms of Use to try instructing the Assistant to do these things. The Assistant can assist with drafting, modelling and analysing, but never moving money or transacting.
- Run machinery. It is a breach of the Terms of Use for you to try instructing the Assistant to operate or control machinery, vehicles, equipment or control systems.
- Promise to remember something. See below.
- Keep something back from someone you've invited into a chat. It is told to, but it can't be relied on to — see Inviting other people in Part 2.
- Promise you a result. Not a saving, not a return, not an environmental outcome. Those come from what you do on the farm — and environmental claims still have to be independently verified.
- Replace your judgement. You know your farm. You make the decisions.
It can be wrong — here's how
Your Assistant is built on large language models that use statistical probability to determine their outputs. That means it produces the most likely answer, not a checked one. It can be inaccurate, incomplete, out of date, or just wrong for your situation — and it will often sound perfectly confident while doing it. Confidence is not accuracy and there can be no guarantee that it will be right.
There's a second thing worth knowing. When you send a voice message, it gets converted to text first, and only then does the Assistant read it. So there are two places an error can creep in: the transcription misinterpreting you, and the Assistant getting it wrong. Either can happen, and so can both. If an answer looks odd, check what it thought you said.
Where the material comes from
Two kinds of material reach you through your Assistant, and neither of them is ours.
Resources from the Regen Library are written by other farmers and by specialists — not by Regen. They help your Assistant prompt the model; they are not our advice, and responsibility for what a Resource says rests with whoever wrote it. When you first use one, you will be asked to accept the terms that come with it. Regen Farmers Mutual reviews Resources before they are published.
Market, price and weather data is fetched from third parties at your request. We don't warrant that it is accurate, complete or up to date. If you point your Assistant at a paid data feed, holding the licence for it is your responsibility.
What it remembers, and what that's worth
Your Assistant's memory works two ways, and they're not equally reliable.
A set of farm facts it reads every time. It keeps a short, curated set of facts about your farm, plus your most recent conversations, and it reads those at the start of every conversation. This part is dependable. You can shape what's in it by telling your Assistant what matters.
A searchable memory of older conversations. Anything beyond the short, curated set of facts it finds by searching its broader workspace for what it assesses looks relevant — not by looking up a fixed record. So it may not bring up something you told it, or it may bring up an older version, and nothing in the conversation will tell you which happened.
So: for anything that matters, ask it to show you, or tell it again — don't take silence as proof you never said it. And it is not a filing system. A chemical rate, a withholding period, a compliance record: keep those in your own records.
Always check and verify yourself
It is important that you verify the outputs of your Assistant, and get advice from relevant professionals when needed, before you act and before anyone else relies on them — including with respect to:
- Chemical and spray rates, withholding periods, and label or permit compliance
- Animal health and treatment
- Financial, accounting and tax figures
- Regulatory, compliance and record-keeping outputs
- Anything a third party will rely on — and issue it from your own records, under your own review and sign-off, rather than straight out of the Assistant
You're in charge
You decide what to ask, which Library resources to use, and what to do with the answer. Your Assistant works inside accounts you've connected, which means it can reach what you can reach. Your review before something is entered, approved or sent is the real safeguard — not a technical lock inside the Assistant.
Part 2 — Your data and how we protect it
Your assistant is yours alone
Every Farm Assistant runs on its own dedicated server, with its own database — not a shared one. Your conversations, Farm Data and records sit in your own environment, and your conversations are never shared with other farms.
Two things sit outside that.
Switchboard. When your Assistant reaches out to a system you've connected — your accounting software, say — the request may be passed along by a shared piece of Regen infrastructure called Switchboard. It routes those requests, and it doesn't store your Farm Data or keep what passes through it. But it does hold the key to each connection you've authorised — in a store shared across farms, where each one is locked with a key of its own, so no other farmer can reach yours. It doesn't keep a record of which of your systems it contacted, or when.
Our account-management systems. Our staff keep records about your account — support tickets, meeting notes, notes about your farm — so we can look after you. These are Regen systems rather than part of your Assistant: they don't give anyone access to your Assistant or your farm website, only authorised Regen Digital and Regen Farmers Mutual staff can see them, and no farmer can reach another farmer's records.
Everything else is kept on your own farm's server: your conversations, your Farm Data, your records, your private website, and the logins for any system your Assistant reaches by working inside a session you've signed in to.
Where your data lives
Your assistant runs on AWS infrastructure in Sydney, and AI processing of your messages happens in-region. Some specific services involve overseas processing: voice transcription and memory search (OpenAI, US), your assistant's code workspace (GitHub, US), your personal website (Cloudflare's global network), the service that connects your Assistant to your other systems (Switchboard, US), outbound voice calls (ElevenLabs, US), and our internal account-management tooling (Anthropic, US). The full list, and what each one receives, is in our Privacy Policy.
Who can see your data
| What | Who sees it | Retained for | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Your messages to and from your assistant | Telegram | Under Telegram's own terms | Telegram is the channel your assistant talks to you on; its handling of your messages is governed by Telegram's own privacy policy |
| Your messages to your assistant | AWS (Anthropic inference models) | Not retained after response | Never used to train AI models |
| Voice messages | OpenAI (transcription) | Up to 30 days | Not used to train their models |
| Your Farm Data & memory | Your own AWS server + Cloudflare | Life of the relationship | Deleted on request — see Deleting your data |
| A daily report on how your assistant is running | Named Regen Digital and Regen Farmers Mutual staff | Life of the relationship | Names you and describes what your assistant did that day — what it sent, what failed, what needs fixing, what it cost — so our staff can act on it. Not shared outside Regen and Watney |
| Your onboarding & account mgt details | Regen Digital (Supabase) | Life of the relationship | Access controlled by Regen Digital |
| Your assistant's code workspace | GitHub (US) | Life of the relationship | Version-controlled; deleted on request — see Deleting your data |
| Your personal farm website | Cloudflare (global network) | Life of the relationship | Your own isolated site & database |
| Your connected accounts | The provider; requests routed via Switchboard | Life of the connection | Switchboard doesn't store your Farm Data, but it does hold the key to each authorised connection, each one encrypted under a key of its own. It keeps no log of which system was contacted, or when. You can revoke a connection at any time |
| Support & account-management records | Regen Digital staff (via Kelpie (GitHub, US); queries processed by Anthropic, US) | Life of the relationship | Staff-only, allow-listed; never used to train models |
Connecting your other systems
You can let your Assistant work with systems you already use — your accounting software, cloud storage, machinery platform. It happens one of two ways.
Where the platform supports it (via the Switchboard service), you log in on their site, and approve the connection there. Your password never comes to us. Some platforms let you choose what the connection is allowed to do at that point — it's worth taking a moment over that screen, because it's the one place you can narrow what your Assistant can reach.
Where the platform doesn't support it — which today is most of them — your Assistant works inside an online session that you've logged in to, the same way you'd use the site yourself. There's no separate permission setting in that case: it can reach whatever you can reach.
We publish guides for some common sites, but a guide only helps set up a connection — you can connect your Assistant to anything you've got an account with. That's your call. It also means we can't tell you in advance what it'll reach, only the rule: on this path it can do what you can do.
Worth knowing — and the difference between the two matters:
- Connections you approve via the Switchboard can only read, not write. Your Assistant can read what's in those systems; it can't change or delete anything in them.
- Where it works inside your own logged-in session, it can change things. There it has the same reach you do — including editing and deleting — and there's no setting that limits it. Check what it's done before you rely on it.
- You can cut a connection any time — at the provider, or by asking us. That stops anything further; it doesn't undo what's already been done.
- Your accounts stay your responsibility, including the provider's own terms.
What we can share, subject to your approval
Farmers learn from each other. If you and your assistant work out a good way of doing something that method may help another farm. We want for you to be able to share your method with others — but only if you say yes, and only ever by sharing the method, never your data.
- You are never obliged to share anything. If something looks like it could help others, you'll be asked. Declining has no consequence and doesn't affect your membership or your service.
- Only a method travels. Workflow logic, judgment and thresholds, expressed as bundled assumptions. Your figures, names, property boundaries, records and images are never included.
- Everything is reviewed before publication to remove personal and identifying information.
- You keep ownership. Sharing is a licence, not a transfer. Regen takes no ownership stake.
- Attribution. What you share is tagged to your assistant and the LLM model version that produced it — which is required for traceability and quality. Whether you are also credited by name is your choice; the default is de-identified and you can change it any time.
- Sharing is permanent. Once you've contributed something it stays in the Library — other farms may already be relying on it, and copies may be installed on their assistants. You can't take it back. We can remove something ourselves if it turns out to be unsafe or wrong.
What we don't do
- We don't sell your data or share it with third parties for marketing
- We don't share your personal information or identifying farm data with sponsors or funders
- We don't use what you tell your assistant to train or fine-tune AI models, to run the service for any other farmer, or for anything other than running Farm Assistant for you
- Your conversations are never shared across farms
- We never share your Farm Data as part of a shared resource — method only
Deleting your data
You can ask us to delete your Farm Data and your assistant's workspace, and we will.
Resources you have contributed are never deleted, in line with the terms you agreed when you contributed them — other farms may already be relying on them.
If your account closes and you haven't asked us either way, we keep your data for at least three months before deleting it. If you want a copy, ask for an export before then.
Getting a copy of your data
You can ask us for an export of your data and your farm-specific memory, comprising:
- your conversations with your assistant;
- files you uploaded;
- your farm records;
- your farm-specific memory — the facts your assistant keeps about your farm;
- your farm website's content and data.
What doesn't come out is the machinery rather than your material — your assistant's instructions and settings, the Library resources installed on it, and the code behind it.
Ask us through Roadside Assistance and we'll walk you through it.
Keeping your account safe
You reach your Assistant through Telegram, so whoever has your phone has your Assistant — your Farm Data, and any system you've connected to it.
If your phone is lost or stolen, or you think someone else has got into your Telegram:
- Cut your connections at the providers — log in to Xero, or John Deere, and revoke access. That's the fastest way to shut the door, it's immediate, and it doesn't wait on us. Do this first.
- Secure your Telegram account with Telegram directly.
- Tell us straight away through Roadside Assistance.
When you tell us, we can disconnect your assistant's connected accounts, take your number off the list allowed to reach it, and change the key to your assistant's server. What we can't yet do is sign you out of your farm website on other devices — a link you've already used keeps that device signed in for 30 days — so treat steps 1 and 2 as the ones that actually protect you.
The same goes for your farm website. You log in with a link we send you, which works once and expires after 10 minutes if it isn't used. Once you've used it, you stay signed in on that device for 30 days — so sign out when you've finished on a device that isn't yours. A link can be forwarded, so only pass one on to someone you're happy to give access to.
Inviting other people
You can let other people use your Assistant — a partner, an employee, an agronomist — by adding their number to the allow list. That list is yours to manage: you decide who goes on it, and you can take someone off it.
Two things to know before you do.
They reach the same Assistant you do. It is told to limit what it says to someone who isn't you, but that is an instruction to a language model, not a permission setting, and it can't be guaranteed. Something you would rather not have shared may come out. So only invite people you would trust with the contents of your Assistant.
Do it in a group chat that includes you. Then you see what is asked and what is answered, and you can correct it at the time. Your Assistant is told not to hold separate conversations with people you have invited, but that is an instruction too — a direct conversation is still possible. The group chat is what actually protects you.
Everything anyone you invite asks, and everything they are shown, sits under your account and is your responsibility. As the account holder you are, in effect, in every conversation your Assistant has.
If you want to share information with someone outside your farm business, your farm website is worth considering instead — it is code, and it shows what it has been built to show. But a link you share gives that person the same view of the site that you have, so that only helps where the whole site is safe for them to see.
Access controls
Access to your data is limited to named Regen Digital and Watney accounts — for support when something needs fixing, and for the account management that keeps your service running.
On the Watney side that means two things and no more: an automated check that reads your assistant's health logs on a schedule, and specific staff who can connect to your assistant's server when something needs fixing. No automated agent has standing access to your data.
If something goes wrong
We follow Australia's Notifiable Data Breaches scheme. If there is an eligible breach affecting your data, we will notify you and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC).
If we change terms
We'll update our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy if the way we work changes, or if the law does. Small changes take effect once we've told you. For a material change we'll ask you to accept it. You don't have to — but if you don't, we may stop providing your Assistant.
Getting help
Roadside Assistance is our human support channel — a Telegram channel straight through to the Regen Support Desk. If something isn't working, or you're not sure whether to trust an answer, ask us. We aim to respond promptly during business hours.
This guide summarises our Terms of Use (including Schedule 1 — Disclaimers and Reliance Wording) and our Privacy Policy. Those documents are the ones that apply.
