A multimodal geospatial foundation model anticipates crop stress and yield failure across climates and species.

INTRODUCTION

Climate extremes increasingly threaten agricultural production, yet many artificial intelligence systems in agriculture remain local, reactive and narrowly trained for one crop, region or sensing modality.

METHODS

We present AgriFM, a multimodal geospatial foundation model that combines satellite image time series, radar, thermal observations, weather trajectories, soil properties, topography and sparse management variables to estimate crop-stress and yield-failure risk across crops and regions. AgriFM was pretrained using self-supervised objectives on 2.4 million field-season sequences and evaluated on a curated benchmark spanning maize, wheat, soybean, rice and sorghum across five agroclimatic regions.

RESULTS

In held-out geography and time-split evaluations, AgriFM improved early stress detection and yield-failure prediction over statistical, crop-model and deep-learning baselines. The largest gains occurred during compound drought and heat events, for which AgriFM produced alerts 18 to 24 days earlier than the satellite-only baseline while maintaining improved calibration. Phenology-conditioned fusion improved transfer across planting calendars, and uncertainty calibration reduced false alerts at fixed recall.

DISCUSSION: Because the study is based on retrospective datasets, these findings establish cross-region retrospective performance rather than prospective field efficacy. The results support further field-based evaluation of multimodal foundation models for climate-resilient crop monitoring.