A multi-farm global to local expert-informed machine learning system for strawberry yield forecasting

Abstract

The importance of forecasting crop yields in agriculture cannot be overstated. The effects of yield forecasting are observed in all the aspects of the supply chain from staffing to supplier demand, food waste, and other business decisions. However, the process is often inaccurate and far from perfect. This paper explores the potential of using expert forecasts to enhance the crop yield predictions of our global-to-local XGBoost machine learning system. Additionally, it investigates the ERA5 climate model’s viability as an alternative data source for crop yield forecasting in the absence of on-farm weather data. We find that, by combining both the expert’s pre-season forecasts and the ERA5 climate model with the machine learning model, we can—in most cases—obtain better forecasts that outperform the growers’ pre-season forecasts and the machine learning-only models. Our expert-informed model attains yield forecasts for 4 weeks ahead with an average RMSE of 0.0855 across all the plots and an RMSE of 0.0872 with the ERA5 climate data included.