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Agricultural artificial intelligence is increasingly shaped by a precision paradigm that treats good farming as the increasingly fine-grained optimization of inputs, outputs, risks, and operational decisions. This paradigm is attractive because it promises measurable efficiency, predictive control, and scalable decision support across complex farming systems. In climate-sensitive agriculture, however, the same orientation can narrow what counts as a good decision. The problem is that climate-sensitive farming is not merely a technical setting in which better data automatically produce better outcomes. Farmers must act under uncertainty, ecological variability, long time horizons, and ethically contested trade-offs involving productivity, resilience, livelihoods, and environmental stewardship. These conditions expose the limits of optimization as a sufficient guide for responsible agricultural AI. This article develops a conceptual framework that shifts the guiding principle of agricultural AI from precision to prudence. Prudence is understood as practical wisdom: the capacity to deliberate well about what is fitting, responsible, and contextually appropriate when action is necessary but certainty is unavailable. The framework therefore reorients AI from prescribing optimal decisions to supporting wise and accountable judgment. The article is based on a conceptual synthesis peer-reviewed publications across agricultural ethics, responsible innovation, precision agriculture, AI governance, climate adaptation, and science and technology studies. It critiques precision agriculture as an optimization paradigm, articulates prudence as a responsible AI principle, and develops a framework for climate-sensitive decision support. Two tables contrast the precision and prudence paradigms and present the proposed conceptual framework. The central argument is not that agricultural AI should abandon data, modelling, prediction, or decision support. Rather, responsible AI for climate-sensitive farming should use these capacities to enlarge human judgment rather than replace it. A prudent AI system helps farmers deliberate under uncertainty, compare trade-offs, question recommendations, and remain accountable for decisions that are ecological, social, and moral as well as technical.

Smart farming increasingly embeds artificial intelligence, machine learning, predictive analytics, remote sensing, robotics, and automated decision-support systems into agronomic decision-making. These technologies promise more precise, timely, and data-intensive forms of farm management. Their growing role suggests that agronomic decisions are no longer shaped only by farmer observation, seasonal experience, and advisory knowledge, but also by algorithmic interpretation. This article addresses the theoretical problem that AI-supported farming systems may improve technical efficiency while simultaneously reshaping farmer judgment, experiential knowledge, trust, and decision authority. Smart farming is therefore not merely a matter of technological adoption. It is also a reconfiguration of how farming problems are recognised, evaluated, prioritised, and acted upon. The objective of the article is to develop a theory of human–AI decision dependence in smart farming. The theory explains how repeated interaction with algorithmic systems can create new forms of reliance, cognitive offloading, skill transformation, and redistributed authority. It also explains why dependence on AI can be supportive, excessive, or contested depending on the quality of system design, institutional context, and farmer capacity to interpret recommendations. The article contributes a conceptual model of human–AI decision dependence in smart farming. It argues that dependence is not simply a user attitude toward technology but a sociotechnical process through which judgment, skill, trust, evidence, and authority are redistributed. This perspective helps future smart farming research examine not only whether AI systems perform accurately, but also how they change the human capacities and decision relations on which farming depends.