An Online Optimization-Based Decision Support Tool for Small Farmers in India: Learning in Non-stationary Environments

Crop management decision support systems are specialized tools for farmers that reduce the riskiness of revenue streams, especially valuable for use under the current climate changes that impact agricultural productivity. Unfortunately, small farmers in India, who could greatly benefit from these tools, do not have access to them. In this paper, we model an individual greenhouse as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and adapt Li and Li (2019)'s Follow the Weighted Leader (FWL) online learning algorithm to offer crop planning advice. We successfully produce utility-preserving cropping pattern suggestions in simulations. When we compare against an offline planning algorithm, we achieve the same cumulative revenue with greatly reduced runtime.