Accurate crop yield forecasting is essential for global food security. However, current AI models systematically underperform when yields deviate from historical trends. We attribute this to the lack of rich, physically grounded datasets directly linking atmospheric states to yields. To address this, we introduce VITA (Variational Inference Transformer for Asymmetric data), a variational pretraining framework that learns representations from large satellite-based weather datasets and transfers to the ground-based limited measurements available for yield prediction. VIT A is trained using detailed meteorological variables as proxy targets during pre-training and learns to predict latent atmospheric states under a seasonality-aware sinusoidal prior. This allows the model to be fine-tuned using limited weather statistics during deployment. Applied to 763 counties in the U.S. Corn Belt, VIT A achieves state-of-the-art performance in predicting corn and soybean yields across all evaluation scenarios, particularly during extreme years, with statistically significant improvements (paired t-test, p < 0.0001). Importantly, VIT A outperforms prior frameworks like GNN-RNN without soil data, and larger foundational models (e.g., Chronos-Bolt) with less compute, making it practical for real-world use--especially in data-scarce regions. This work highlights how domain-aware AI design can overcome data limitations and support resilient agricultural forecasting in a changing climate.

Accurate and fine-grained crop yield prediction plays a crucial role in advancing global agriculture. However, the accuracy of pixel-level yield estimation based on satellite remote sensing data has been constrained by the scarcity of ground truth data. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach called the Multi-Task Crop Yield Prediction Network (MT-CYP-Net). This framework introduces an effective multi-task feature-sharing strategy, where features extracted from a shared backbone network are simultaneously utilized by both crop yield prediction decoders and crop classification decoders with the ability to fuse information between them. This design allows MT-CYP-Net to be trained with extremely sparse crop yield point labels and crop type labels, while still generating detailed pixel-level crop yield maps. Concretely, we collected 1,859 yield point labels along with corresponding crop type labels and satellite images from eight farms in Heilongjiang Province, China, in 2023, covering soybean, maize, and rice crops, and constructed a sparse crop yield label dataset. MT-CYP-Net is compared with three classical machine learning and deep learning benchmark methods in this dataset. Experimental results not only indicate the superiority of MT-CYP-Net compared to previous methods on multiple types of crops but also demonstrate the potential of deep networks on precise pixel-level crop yield prediction, especially with limited data labels.

Sudden Death Syndrome (SDS), caused by Fusarium virguliforme, poses a significant threat to soybean production. This study presents an AI-driven web application for early detection of SDS on soybean leaves using hyperspectral imaging, enabling diagnosis prior to visible symptom onset. Leaf samples from healthy and inoculated plants were scanned using a portable hyperspectral imaging system (398-1011 nm), and a Genetic Algorithm was employed to select five informative wavelengths (505.4, 563.7, 712.2, 812.9, and 908.4 nm) critical for discriminating infection status. These selected bands were fed into a lightweight Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to extract spatial-spectral features, which were subsequently classified using ten classical machine learning models. Ensemble classifiers (Random Forest, AdaBoost), Linear SVM, and Neural Net achieved the highest accuracy (>98%) and minimal error across all folds, as confirmed by confusion matrices and cross-validation metrics. Poor performance by Gaussian Process and QDA highlighted their unsuitability for this dataset. The trained models were deployed within a web application that enables users to upload hyperspectral leaf images, visualize spectral profiles, and receive real-time classification results. This system supports rapid and accessible plant disease diagnostics, contributing to precision agriculture practices. Future work will expand the training dataset to encompass diverse genotypes, field conditions, and disease stages, and will extend the system for multiclass disease classification and broader crop applicability.

We present an application of a foundation model for small- to medium-sized tabular data (TabPFN), to sub-national yield forecasting task in South Africa. TabPFN has recently demonstrated superior performance compared to traditional machine learning (ML) models in various regression and classification tasks. We used the dekadal (10-days) time series of Earth Observation (EO; FAPAR and soil moisture) and gridded weather data (air temperature, precipitation and radiation) to forecast the yield of summer crops at the sub-national level. The crop yield data was available for 23 years and for up to 8 provinces. Covariate variables for TabPFN (i.e., EO and weather) were extracted by region and aggregated at a monthly scale. We benchmarked the results of the TabPFN against six ML models and three baseline models. Leave-one-year-out cross-validation experiment setting was used in order to ensure the assessment of the models capacity to forecast an unseen year. Results showed that TabPFN and ML models exhibit comparable accuracy, outperforming the baselines. Nonetheless, TabPFN demonstrated superior practical utility due to its significantly faster tuning time and reduced requirement for feature engineering. This renders TabPFN a more viable option for real-world operation yield forecasting applications, where efficiency and ease of implementation are paramount.

Autonomous navigation is crucial for various robotics applications in agriculture. However, many existing methods depend on RTK-GPS systems, which are expensive and susceptible to poor signal coverage. This paper introduces a state-of-the-art LiDAR-based navigation system that can achieve over-canopy autonomous navigation in row-crop fields, even when the canopy fully blocks the interrow spacing. Our crop row detection algorithm can detect crop rows across diverse scenarios, encompassing various crop types, growth stages, weeds presence, and discontinuities within the crop rows. Without utilizing the global localization of the robot, our navigation system can perform autonomous navigation in these challenging scenarios, detect the end of the crop rows, and navigate to the next crop row autonomously, providing a crop-agnostic approach to navigate the whole row-crop field. This navigation system has undergone tests in various simulated agricultural fields, achieving an average of 2.98cm autonomous driving accuracy without human intervention on the custom Amiga robot. In addition, the qualitative results of our crop row detection algorithm from the actual soybean fields validate our LiDAR-based crop row detection algorithm's potential for practical agricultural applications.

Soybean production is susceptible to biotic and abiotic stresses, exacerbated by extreme weather events. Water limiting stress, i.e. drought, emerges as a significant risk for soybean production, underscoring the need for advancements in stress monitoring for crop breeding and production. This project combines multi-modal information to identify the most effective and efficient automated methods to investigate drought response. We investigated a set of diverse soybean accessions using multiple sensors in a time series high-throughput phenotyping manner to: (1) develop a pipeline for rapid classification of soybean drought stress symptoms, and (2) investigate methods for early detection of drought stress. We utilized high-throughput time-series phenotyping using UAVs and sensors in conjunction with machine learning (ML) analytics, which offered a swift and efficient means of phenotyping. The red-edge and green bands were most effective to classify canopy wilting stress. The Red-Edge Chlorophyll Vegetation Index (RECI) successfully differentiated susceptible and tolerant soybean accessions prior to visual symptom development. We report pre-visual detection of soybean wilting using a combination of different vegetation indices. These results can contribute to early stress detection methodologies and rapid classification of drought responses in screening nurseries for breeding and production applications.

Machine learning tasks often require a significant amount of training data for the resultant network to perform suitably for a given problem in any domain. In agriculture, dataset sizes are further limited by phenotypical differences between two plants of the same genotype, often as a result of differing growing conditions. Synthetically-augmented datasets have shown promise in improving existing models when real data is not available. In this paper, we employ a contrastive unpaired translation (CUT) generative adversarial network (GAN) and simple image processing techniques to translate indoor plant images to appear as field images. While we train our network to translate an image containing only a single plant, we show that our method is easily extendable to produce multiple-plant field images. Furthermore, we use our synthetic multi-plant images to train several YoloV5 nano object detection models to perform the task of plant detection and measure the accuracy of the model on real field data images. Including training data generated by the CUT-GAN leads to better plant detection performance compared to a network trained solely on real data.

Research guided by a plant pathologist in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences suggests that machine-learning algorithms that are programmed to recognize changing weather patterns could show producers and agricultural managers how to increase soybean and corn yields in the United States. The approach could prove valuable in addressing climate change realities that have presented challenges in growing enough food for a rising global population, noted Paul Esker, associate professor of epidemiology and field crop pathology. "Soybean and corn are among the most valuable crops in terms of food supply and economic output in the U.S. agricultural sector," said Esker, who pointed to U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics that place corn as the most widely produced crop in the U.S., with soybean following close behind. Not only are these crops vital to food security in the U.S. and beyond, but their combined total value to the nation's economy is more than $100 billion. While Esker acknowledges that is an impressive figure, he points out that many scientists predict that that by 2050, the world must feed 9 billion people, so current outputs must increase.

Register for our blog to get new articles as we release them. Demand Forecasting is a technique for estimation of probable demand for a product or services. It is based on the analysis of past demand for that product or service in the present market condition. Demand forecasting should be done on a scientific basis and facts and events related to forecasting should be considered. After gathering information about various aspects of the market and demand based on the past, is possible to estimate future demand.

Crop yield prediction is extremely challenging due to its dependence on multiple factors such as crop genotype, environmental factors, management practices, and their interactions. This paper presents a deep learning framework using convolutional neural networks (CNN) and recurrent neural networks (RNN) for crop yield prediction based on environmental data and management practices. The proposed CNN-RNN model, along with other popular methods such as random forest (RF), deep fully-connected neural networks (DFNN), and LASSO, was used to forecast corn and soybean yield across the entire Corn Belt (including 13 states) in the United States for years 2016, 2017, and 2018 using historical data. The new model achieved a root-mean-square-error (RMSE) 9% and 8% of their respective average yields, substantially outperforming all other methods that were tested. The CNN-RNN have three salient features that make it a potentially useful method for other crop yield prediction studies. (1) The CNN-RNN model was designed to capture the time dependencies of environmental factors and the genetic improvement of seeds over time without having their genotype information. (2) The model demonstrated the capability to generalize the yield prediction to untested environments without significant drop in the prediction accuracy. (3) Coupled with the backpropagation method, the model could reveal the extent to which weather conditions, accuracy of weather predictions, soil conditions, and management practices were able to explain the variation in the crop yields.