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Issue 52 is a single editorial. The argument it makes is one of the more important ones we’ve put in print: the rancher who isn’t showing up in AI usage data is often the heaviest AI user in the room.

An industry piece ran recently asking whether AI can pull a calf. The answer was no — which is correct. It is also exactly the wrong question, and the framing behind it is causing a lot of people who should know better to badly misjudge where artificial intelligence actually sits in the modern cattle operation.

This week’s issue is a single editorial from our editor. We’re breaking from the two-story format because the argument deserves the full run rather than half a page. It takes on the Anthropic Economic Index — a serious piece of research from the company that makes Claude, the AI tool a significant share of our subscriber base is already using — and explains exactly where that research goes right and where it goes wrong about us.

The short version: Anthropic’s data correctly shows that very few AI conversations are about cattle. The conclusion some are drawing from that — that ranchers aren’t using AI — has the situation backwards. Many working ranches have quietly become heavy users of generative AI for the office side of the business. The problem is that the office side of a modern cattle operation doesn’t look like a cattle operation to a federal job taxonomy written forty years ago.

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