# FARM: Fine-Tuning Geospatial Foundation Models for Intra-Field Crop Yield Regression

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.26609 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.26609/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Prithvi-EO-2.0: A Versatile Multi-Temporal Foundation Model for Earth Observation Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02732/) (2024)
- [A CNN-RNN Framework for Crop Yield Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09045/) (2019)
- [A GNN-RNN Approach for Harnessing Geospatial and Temporal Information: Application to Crop Yield Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08900/) (2021)
- [Coupling Machine Learning and Crop Modeling Improves Crop Yield Prediction in the US Corn Belt](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.04060/) (2020)
- [Vision Transformers in Precision Agriculture: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21706/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Transferability and operational reliability of a Prithvi crop classification foundation model under phenological and geographic shift across three continents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.08810/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accurate and timely crop yield prediction is crucial for global food security and modern agricultural management. Traditional methods often lack the scalability and granularity required for precision farming. This paper introduces FARM: Fine-tuning Agricultural Regression Models, a deep learning framework designed for high-resolution, intra-field canola yield prediction. FARM leverages a pre-trained, large-scale geospatial foundation model (Prithvi-EO-2.0-600M) and adapts it for a continuous regression task, transforming multi-temporal satellite imagery into dense, pixel-level (30 m) yield maps. Evaluated on a comprehensive dataset from the Canadian Prairies, FARM achieves a Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) of 0.44 and an R^2 of 0.81. Using an independent high-resolution yield monitor dataset, we further show that fine-tuning FARM on limited ground-truth labels outperforms training the same architecture from scratch, confirming the benefit of pre-training on large, upsampled county-level data for data-scarce precision agriculture. These results represent improvement over baseline architectures like 3D-CNN and DeepYield, which highlight the effectiveness of fine-tuning foundation models for specialized agricultural applications. By providing a continuous, high-resolution output, FARM offers a more actionable tool for precision agriculture than conventional classification or county-level aggregation methods. This work validates a novel approach that bridges the gap between large-scale Earth observation and on-farm decision-making, offering a scalable solution for detailed agricultural monitoring.