Weather Wizards: How AI Helps Farmers Predict Crop Yields

Think of farming as a giant puzzle with pieces that change every day. Weather plays a big role in how crops grow. Scientists are using artificial intelligence (AI) to make predictions easier. They fed a huge dataset of soybean hybrids into two different AI models: one using something called convolutional neural networks (CNN), and another combining CNN with a long short-term memory layer (CNN-LSTM). They mixed these models using a method called the Generalized Ensemble Method (GEM) to make even better predictions. Testing showed that the GEM model was better at guessing yields for new crops than the individual models. Surprisingly, adding soil data from different states didn't help much. The most important factors turned out to be where the crop was grown, the type of crop, and weather factors like maximum direct normal irradiance (MDNI) and average precipitation (AP).