WOFOSTGym: A Crop Simulator for Learning Annual and Perennial Crop Management Strategies

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Solow, William, Saisubramanian, Sandhya, Fern, Alan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Solow, William
Saisubramanian, Sandhya
Fern, Alan
author_facet Solow, William
Saisubramanian, Sandhya
Fern, Alan
contents We introduce WOFOSTGym, a novel crop simulation environment designed to train reinforcement learning (RL) agents to optimize agromanagement decisions for annual and perennial crops in single and multi-farm settings. Effective crop management requires optimizing yield and economic returns while minimizing environmental impact, a complex sequential decision-making problem well suited for RL. However, the lack of simulators for perennial crops in multi-farm contexts has hindered RL applications in this domain. Existing crop simulators also do not support multiple annual crops. WOFOSTGym addresses these gaps by supporting 23 annual crops and two perennial crops, enabling RL agents to learn diverse agromanagement strategies in multi-year, multi-crop, and multi-farm settings. Our simulator offers a suite of challenging tasks for learning under partial observability, non-Markovian dynamics, and delayed feedback. WOFOSTGym's standard RL interface allows researchers without agricultural expertise to explore a wide range of agromanagement problems. Our experiments demonstrate the learned behaviors across various crop varieties and soil types, highlighting WOFOSTGym's potential for advancing RL-driven decision support in agriculture.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_19308
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle WOFOSTGym: A Crop Simulator for Learning Annual and Perennial Crop Management Strategies
Solow, William
Saisubramanian, Sandhya
Fern, Alan
Artificial Intelligence
We introduce WOFOSTGym, a novel crop simulation environment designed to train reinforcement learning (RL) agents to optimize agromanagement decisions for annual and perennial crops in single and multi-farm settings. Effective crop management requires optimizing yield and economic returns while minimizing environmental impact, a complex sequential decision-making problem well suited for RL. However, the lack of simulators for perennial crops in multi-farm contexts has hindered RL applications in this domain. Existing crop simulators also do not support multiple annual crops. WOFOSTGym addresses these gaps by supporting 23 annual crops and two perennial crops, enabling RL agents to learn diverse agromanagement strategies in multi-year, multi-crop, and multi-farm settings. Our simulator offers a suite of challenging tasks for learning under partial observability, non-Markovian dynamics, and delayed feedback. WOFOSTGym's standard RL interface allows researchers without agricultural expertise to explore a wide range of agromanagement problems. Our experiments demonstrate the learned behaviors across various crop varieties and soil types, highlighting WOFOSTGym's potential for advancing RL-driven decision support in agriculture.
title WOFOSTGym: A Crop Simulator for Learning Annual and Perennial Crop Management Strategies
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.19308