We introduce WOFOSTGym, a novel crop simulation environment designed to train reinforcement learning (RL) agents to optimize agromanagement decisions for annual and perennial crops in single and multi-farm settings. Effective crop management requires optimizing yield and economic returns while minimizing environmental impact, a complex sequential decision-making problem well suited for RL. However, the lack of simulators for perennial crops in multi-farm contexts has hindered RL applications in this domain. Existing crop simulators also do not support multiple annual crops. WOFOSTGym addresses these gaps by supporting 23 annual crops and two perennial crops, enabling RL agents to learn diverse agromanagement strategies in multi-year, multi-crop, and multi-farm settings. Our simulator offers a suite of challenging tasks for learning under partial observability, non-Markovian dynamics, and delayed feedback. WOFOSTGym's standard RL interface allows researchers without agricultural expertise to explore a wide range of agromanagement problems. Our experiments demonstrate the learned behaviors across various crop varieties and soil types, highlighting WOFOSTGym's potential for advancing RL-driven decision support in agriculture.

Crop management involves a series of critical, interdependent decisions or actions in a complex and highly uncertain environment, which exhibit distinct spatial and temporal variations. Managing resource inputs such as fertilizer and irrigation in the face of climate change, dwindling supply, and soaring prices is nothing short of a Herculean task. The ability of machine learning to efficiently interrogate complex, nonlinear, and high-dimensional datasets can revolutionize decision-making in agriculture. In this paper, we introduce a reinforcement learning (RL) environment that leverages the dynamics in the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) and enables management practices to be assessed and evaluated on a watershed level. This drastically saves time and resources that would have been otherwise deployed during a full-growing season. We consider crop management as an optimization problem where the objective is to produce higher crop yield while minimizing the use of external farming inputs (specifically, fertilizer and irrigation amounts). The problem is naturally subject to environmental factors such as precipitation, solar radiation, temperature, and soil water content. We demonstrate the utility of our framework by developing and benchmarking various decision-making agents following management strategies informed by standard farming practices and state-of-the-art RL algorithms.

SARDI scientist Rhiannon Schilling showcases a demonstration application created by using paddock data and machine learning models. PINPOINTING the cause of paddock-yield variability using large data sets and innovative machine-learning models is the focus of a project led by the University of Adelaide and funded by the Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC). South Australian Research and Development Institute (SARDI) agriculture scientist Rhiannon Schilling gave an update of the project at ABARES Outlook online this week. Ms Schilling said the research looked at the challenge of working out what is behind variability in crop growth and yield across paddocks. "Often there has been a focus on improving grain yields of our varieties; but when we drive around and have a look at our paddocks, we can see that we are not always achieving uniform crop growth and yield across our paddocks," Ms Schilling said.

Greenhouse environment is the key to influence crops production. However, it is difficult for classical control methods to give precise environment setpoints, such as temperature, humidity, light intensity and carbon dioxide concentration for greenhouse because it is uncertain nonlinear system. Therefore, an intelligent close loop control framework based on model embedded deep reinforcement learning (MEDRL) is designed for greenhouse environment control. Specifically, computer vision algorithms are used to recognize growing periods and sex of crops, followed by the crop growth models, which can be trained with different growing periods and sex. These model outputs combined with the cost factor provide the setpoints for greenhouse and feedback to the control system in real-time. The whole MEDRL system has capability to conduct optimization control precisely and conveniently, and costs will be greatly reduced compared with traditional greenhouse control approaches.

In a world reached a population of six billion humans increasingly demand it for food, feed with a water shortage and the decline of agricultural land and the deterioration of the climate needs 1.5 billion hectares of agricultural land and in case of failure to combat pests needs about 4 billion hectares. Weeds represent 34% of the whole pests while insects, diseases and the deterioration of agricultural land present the remaining percentage. Weeds identification has been one of the most interesting classification problems for Artificial intelligence and image processing. The most common case is to identify weeds within the field as they reduce the productivity and harm the existing crops. Success in this area results in an increased productivity, profitability and at the same time decreases the cost of operation.