Finding Optimal Farming Practices to Increase Crop Yield Through Global-Best Harmony Search and Predictive Models, a Data-Driven Approach

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.