Federated agricultural yield forecasting under an Edge–Fog–Cloud framework: a multi-country privacy-preserving approach

Predicting agricultural yields is crucial for ensuring global food security and adaptation to climate change. However, the centralized collection of agricultural data across countries might pose governance, privacy, and data sovereignty issues. This research presents a privacy-preserving model for predicting agricultural yields using federated learning within an edge-fog-cloud integrated architecture. The experiments have been performed on a European cereal production dataset for the period 1990–2022, using a time-aware forecasting scheme. Centralized, edge-only, federated, and hybrid learning techniques have been systematically compared to examine the influence of distributed optimization on forecasting performance. It can be seen that central classical machine learning algorithms have yielded the best predictive performance. Federated deep learning models, meanwhile, showed relatively poor forecasting accuracy compared to their centralized counterparts under a non-IID distribution of multi-country agricultural data. Edge-only learning, meanwhile, has yielded comparatively low generalization capabilities due to the absence of collaborative learning.