Abstract
Maize (corn) is the dominant grain grown in the world. Total maize production in 2018 equaled 1.12 billion tons. Maize is used primarily as an animal feed in the production of eggs, dairy, pork and chicken. The US produces 32% of the world’s maize followed by China at 22% and Brazil at 9% (https://apps.fas.usda.gov/psdonline/app/index.html#/app/home). Accurate national-scale corn yield prediction critically impacts mercantile markets through providing essential information about expected production prior to harvest. Publicly available high-quality corn yield prediction can help address emergent information asymmetry problems and in doing so improve price efficiency in futures markets. We build a deep learning model to predict corn yields, specifically focusing on county-level prediction across 10 states of the Corn-Belt in the United States, and pre-harvest prediction with monthly updates from August. The results show promising predictive power relative to existing survey-based methods and set the foundation for a publicly available county yield prediction effort that complements existing public forecasts.
Highlights
Background knowledgeCorn is mainly grown in the midwestern part of the United State, in an area called the Corn-Belt. (Corn belt definition, https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2848&context=usdaarsfacpub.) The region is characterized by level land, deep fertile soils, and high organic soil concentration[10]
This paper describes the prediction of county-level corn yields in the Corn Belt area using the deep learning method called Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)
Results show that our LSTM model can provide useful early prediction and accurate county-level corn yield prediction in the US Corn-Belt without private farm management data and the genetic information of seeds
Summary
Background knowledgeCorn is mainly grown in the midwestern part of the United State, in an area called the Corn-Belt. (Corn belt definition, https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2848&context=usdaarsfacpub.) The region is characterized by level land, deep fertile soils, and high organic soil concentration[10]. The USDA reports the nationwide county level corn yield in late February of the following year. Farmers use the corn futures contract as a way to reduce risk. They accomplish this by selling a portion of their expected production at a set price before harvest commences. At the time of writing (7/30/2019) total volume of short (sold) futures on the Chicago corn futures market equaled 1,776,475 c ontracts[11]. To put this in perspective this volume of sold corn represents approximately 60% of 2018 US corn production of 14.63 billion bushels[12]. The corn futures price depends heavily on the expected harvest volume, which in turn depends on the weather during the growing season
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