Methods for Mid-Term Forecasting of Crop Export and Production

Abstract

A vast number of studies are devoted to the short-term forecasting of agricultural production and market. However, those results are more helpful for market traders than producers and agricultural policy regulators because any structural change in that field requires a while to be implemented. The mid and long-term predictions (from one year and more) of production and market demand seem more helpful. However, this problem requires considering long-term dependencies between various features. The most natural way of analyzing all those features together is with deep neural networks. The paper presents neural network models for mid-term forecasting of crop production and export, which considers heterogeneous features such as trade flows, production levels, macroeconomic indicators, fuel pricing, and vegetation indexes. They also utilize text-mining to assess changes in the news flow related to the state agricultural policy, sanctions, and the context in the local and international food markets. We collected and combined data from various local and international providers such as UN FAOSTAT, UN Comtrade, social media, the International Monetary Fund for 15 of the world’s top wheat exporters. The experiments show that the proposed models with additive regularization can accurately predict grain export and production levels. We also confirmed that vegetation indexes and fuel prices are crucial for export prediction. Still, the fuel prices seem to be more important for predicting production than the NDVI indexes from past observations.

Keywords

• wheat production and export forecast
• transformer
• recurrent network
• NARX
• regularization
• sentiment analysis