Crop yield is a highly complex trait determined by multiple factors such as genotype, environment, and their interactions. Accurate yield prediction requires fundamental understanding of the functional relationship between yield and these interactive factors, and to reveal such relationship requires both comprehensive datasets and powerful algorithms. In the 2018 Syngenta Crop Challenge, Syngenta released several large datasets that recorded the genotype and yield performances of 2,267 maize hybrids planted in 2,247 locations between 2008 and 2016 and asked participants to predict the yield performance in 2017. As one of the winning teams, we designed a deep neural network (DNN) approach that took advantage of state-of-the-art modeling and solution techniques. Our model was found to have a superior prediction accuracy, with a root-mean-square-error (RMSE) being 12% of the average yield and 50% of the standard deviation for the validation dataset using predicted weather data. With perfect weather data, the RMSE would be reduced to 11% of the average yield and 46% of the standard deviation. We also performed feature selection based on the trained DNN model, which successfully decreased the dimension of the input space without significant drop in the prediction accuracy. Our computational results suggested that this model significantly outperformed other popular methods such as Lasso, shallow neural networks (SNN), and regression tree (RT). The results also revealed that environmental factors had a greater effect on the crop yield than genotype.

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 (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs) 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 has 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.

Large-scale crop yield estimation is, in part, made possible due to the availability of remote sensing data allowing for the continuous monitoring of crops throughout their growth cycle. Having this information allows stakeholders the ability to make real-time decisions to maximize yield potential. Although various models exist that predict yield from remote sensing data, there currently does not exist an approach that can estimate yield for multiple crops simultaneously, and thus leads to more accurate predictions. A model that predicts the yield of multiple crops and concurrently considers the interaction between multiple crop yields. We propose a new convolutional neural network model called YieldNet which utilizes a novel deep learning framework that uses transfer learning between corn and soybean yield predictions by sharing the weights of the backbone feature extractor. Additionally, to consider the multi-target response variable, we propose a new loss function. We conduct our experiment using data from 1132 counties for corn and 1076 counties for soybean across the United States. Numerical results demonstrate that our proposed method accurately predicts corn and soybean yield from one to four months before the harvest with an MAE being 8.74% and 8.70% of the average yield, respectively, and is competitive to other state-of-the-art approaches.

Precise in-season corn grain yield estimates enable farmers to make real-time accurate harvest and grain marketing decisions minimizing possible losses of profitability. A well developed corn ear can have up to 800 kernels, but manually counting the kernels on an ear of corn is labor-intensive, time consuming and prone to human error. From an algorithmic perspective, the detection of the kernels from a single corn ear image is challenging due to the large number of kernels at different angles and very small distance among the kernels. In this paper, we propose a kernel detection and counting method based on a sliding window approach. The proposed method detects and counts all corn kernels in a single corn ear image taken in uncontrolled lighting conditions. The sliding window approach uses a convolutional neural network (CNN) for kernel detection. Then, a non-maximum suppression (NMS) is applied to remove overlapping detections. Finally, windows that are classified as kernel are passed to another CNN regression model for finding the ( x , y ) coordinates of the center of kernel image patches. Our experiments indicate that the proposed method can successfully detect the corn kernels with a low detection error and is also able to detect kernels on a batch of corn ears positioned at different angles.

Experimental corn hybrids are created in plant breeding programs by crossing two parents, so-called inbred and tester, together. Identification of best parent combinations for crossing is challenging since the total number of possible cross combinations of parents is large and it is impractical to test all possible cross combinations due to limited resources of time and budget. In the 2020 Syngenta Crop Challenge, Syngenta released several large datasets that recorded the historical yield performances of around 4% of total cross combinations of 593 inbreds with 496 testers which were planted in 280 locations between 2016 and 2018 and asked participants to predict the yield performance of cross combinations of inbreds and testers that have not been planted based on the historical yield data collected from crossing other inbreds and testers. In this paper, we present a collaborative filtering method which is an ensemble of matrix factorization method and a neural network to solve this problem. Our computational results suggested that the proposed model significantly outperformed other models such as deep factorization machines (DeepFM), generalized matrix factorization (GMF), LASSO, random forest (RF), and neural networks. Presented method and results were produced within the 2020 Syngenta Crop Challenge.