Abstract
Increasing crops’ yields to meet the world’s demand for food is one of the great challenges of these times. To achieve this, farmers must make the best decisions based on the resources available for them. In this paper, we propose the use of Global-best Harmony Search (GHS) to find the optimal farming practices and increase the yields according to the local climate and soil characteristics, following the principles of site-specific agriculture. We propose to build an aptitude function based on a random forest model trained on farms’ data combined with open data sources for climate and soil. The result is an optimizer that uses a data-driven approach and generates information on the optimized farming practices, allowing the farmer to harness the full potential of his land. The approach was tested on a case-study on maize in the state of Chiapas, Mexico, where the adoption of the practices suggested by our approach was estimated to increase average yield by 1.7 ton/ha, contributing to closing the yield gap. The proposal has the potential to be scaled to other locations, other response variables and other crops.
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Acknowledgements
The research has been supported by International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) and is based on data shared by the MASAGRO project lead by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), we also acknowledge for the open data shared by INIFAP and INEGI. We are especially grateful to Colin McLachlan for suggestions relating to the text in English.
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Appendix
Appendix
Appendix 1. Dataset description
Reference | Description | Classification | Scale |
---|---|---|---|
M1 | Total amount of nitrogen applied | Practices | Continuous |
M2 | Total amount of phosphorus applied | Practices | Continuous |
M3 | Total amount of potassium applied | Practices | Continues |
M4 | Number of mechanical weeding | Practices | Discrete |
M5 | Number of post-harvest herbicides applications | Practices | Discrete |
M6 | Number of “rastreo” | Practices | Discrete |
M7 | Number of pre-sowing herbicides applications | Practices | Discrete |
M8 | Number of fertilizations | Practices | Discrete |
M9 | Number of applications of foliar fertilizers | Practices | Discrete |
M10 | Number of applications of biofertilizants | Practices | Discrete |
M11 | Number of post-sowing herbicides applications | Practices | Discrete |
M12 | Number of applications of insecticides | Practices | Discrete |
M13 | Cultivars’ group criollo | Practices | Discrete |
M14 | Cultivars’ group Dekalb | Practices | Discrete |
M15 | Cultivars’ group others | Practices | Discrete |
M16 | Cultivars’ group P4082 W | Practices | Discrete |
M17 | No seed treatment | Practices | Discrete |
M18 | Seed treatment | Practices | Discrete |
M19 | Conservation agriculture | Practices | Discrete |
M20 | Zero or minimum tillage | Practices | Discrete |
M21 | Conventional tillage | Practices | Discrete |
S1 | Clay content | Soil | Continuous |
S2 | Silt content | Soil | Continuous |
S3 | Soil organic content | Soil | Continuous |
S4 | Cationic exchange capacity | Soil | Continuous |
S5 | Basis saturation | Soil | Continuous |
S6 | Low infiltration | Soil | Discrete |
S7 | Moderate infiltration | Soil | Discrete |
S8 | Good infiltration | Soil | Discrete |
W1 | Average minimum temperature | Weather | Continuous |
W2 | Average diurnal range | Weather | Continuous |
W3 | Accumulated solar energy | Weather | Continuous |
W4 | Frequency of days with maximum temperature above 34°C | Weather | Continuous |
W5 | Accumulated precipitation | Weather | Continuous |
W6 | Frequency of days with minimum temperature below 8°C | Weather | Continuous |
W7 | Average relative humidity | Weather | Continuous |
W8 | Standard deviation of the relative humidity | Weather | Continuous |
Y | Yield | Yield | Continuous |
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Dorado, H., Delerce, S., Jimenez, D., Cobos, C. (2018). Finding Optimal Farming Practices to Increase Crop Yield Through Global-Best Harmony Search and Predictive Models, a Data-Driven Approach. In: Batyrshin, I., Martínez-Villaseñor, M., Ponce Espinosa, H. (eds) Advances in Computational Intelligence. MICAI 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11289. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04497-8_2
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