Agent-Based Post-Hoc Correction of Agricultural Yield Forecasts
It addresses the problem of accurate crop yield forecasting for commercial farms lacking high-resolution data, offering a practical correction method that improves existing models.
The paper introduces an LLM agent framework for post-hoc correction of agricultural yield forecasts, achieving up to 28% MAE and 66% MASE reduction on strawberry yield prediction across multiple baselines.
Accurate crop yield forecasting in commercial soft fruit production is constrained by the data available in typical commercial farm records, which lack the sensor networks, satellite imagery, and high-resolution meteorological inputs that most state-of-the-art approaches assume. We propose a structured LLM agent framework that performs post-hoc correction of existing model predictions, encoding agricultural domain knowledge across tools for phase detection, bias learning, and range validation. Evaluated on a proprietary strawberry yield dataset and a public USDA corn harvest dataset, agent refinement of XGBoost reduced MAE by 20% and MASE by 56% on strawberry, with consistent improvements across Moirai2 (MAE 24%, MASE 22%) and Random Forest (MAE 28%, MASE 66%) baselines. Using Llama 3.1 8B as the agent produced the strongest corrections across all configurations; LLaVA 13B showed inconsistent gains, highlighting sensitivity to the choice of refinement model.