Crop Yield Prediction for Punjab, Pakistan: A Tree-Ensemble and Leaf-Health Prototype, and What Random Validation Hides

Reliable agricultural yield statistics are typically reported at coarse administrative scales, whereas modern geospatial machine learning methods require spatially explicit, pixel level supervision. This mismatch has limited the development of large-scale benchmarks for crop yield learning using multimodal Earth observation data. A reproducible benchmark, AgroBench, is presented for transforming publicly available U.S. county level crop yield statistics into weakly supervised pixel-level crop time series. Each crop pixel time series is paired with a county-level yield value as a weak supervisory signal rather than a directly measured pixel-level yield label. Our geospatial data generation pipeline integrates USDA crop yield statistics with crop-specific land cover masks, Sentinel 2 multispectral imagery, Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar observations, climatic variables, and terrain information to produce temporally aligned multimodal sequences describing individual crop pixels throughout the growing season. The resulting benchmark contains over 13 million observations from 788,654 unique crop pixels spanning 5,107 county year combinations across eight growing seasons (2017 to 2024) for five major U.S. crops. To facilitate standardized evaluation, we establish a crop yield prediction benchmark using a Leave-One-Year-Out evaluation protocol and provide baseline results using representative machine learning models. By releasing the complete data generation pipeline, benchmark dataset, and evaluation protocol, AgroBench provides a reproducible foundation for future research in weakly supervised learning, multimodal remote sensing, spatiotemporal modeling, and geospatial foundation models for agriculture.

Sierra Leone's agriculture operates with almost no data-driven decision support, and no published machine learning study has examined the country's crop yields. We ask whether rice yield can be forecast from data Sierra Leone currently has. Using 25 years of FAOSTAT production data (2000-2024) for nine major crops, we train XGBoost, Gradient Boosting, and Random Forest under a strict anti-leakage protocol with expanding-window walk-forward evaluation across seven held-out years, benchmarked against naive persistence. No model trained on crop statistics alone outperforms persistence. Augmenting with free satellite climate data (CHIRPS rainfall, NASA POWER temperature) reverses this result: a climate-only XGBoost reduces forecast error by one third (RMSE 284 vs 428 kg/ha), a gain that holds for a linear model and is robust to excluding the anomalous 2018 season. Early-season (May-June) rainfall is the dominant predictor, implying seasonal yield risk is observable months before harvest. No model anticipated the 2018 collapse, whose origins were institutional rather than climatic. We translate the findings into policy recommendations for Sierra Leone's Feed Salone Strategy, with a fully open-source pipeline.

Accurate yield forecasting at the individual-plant level is critical for precision agriculture and supply-chain planning, yet public datasets capturing both visual growth dynamics and per-plant measurement labels are scarce. In this paper, we introduce a novel, annotated image time-series dataset of 691 sweet pepper plants monitored over two growing seasons, comprising 4837 images with per-plant fruit counts categorized by maturity. We propose a multimodal deep learning framework that fuses high-dimensional image features, extracted using the DinoV3 encoder, with numerical count measurements. Our architecture utilizes a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network to model temporal dependencies and handles irregular sampling intervals common in greenhouse monitoring. Through quantitative experiments, we demonstrate that this multimodal approach reduces RMSE over a persistence baseline by 33% and 38% in the 2022 and 2023 seasons, respectively, with a further 1.2% average gain over a measurement-only model. Furthermore, we employ Deep Ensembles and Gaussian Negative Log-Likelihood (NLL) to provide calibrated uncertainty estimates, with an Uncertainty Calibration Error (UCE) ranging from 0.39 to 0.89 depending on the cross-season evaluation direction, offering a principled confidence signal for real-world agricultural decision-making. We release the dataset and code to support reproducible research and to accelerate development of data-driven yield forecasting methods for horticultural crops.