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Crop production around the globe is increasingly at risk from invasive organisms, particularly the Fall Armyworm (FAW, Spodoptera frugiperda), which has caused severe deterioration of maize harvests across both Africa and Asia starting in 2016. To enable targeted pest control, an adaptive Echo State Network (ESN) was constructed that projects yearly maize output while factoring in FAW burden. A 15-year (2010–2024) monthly repository was built, integrating vegetation indicators from satellites, field-level meteorological measurements, soil nutrient readings, and FAW observation tallies. The intensity of FAW infestation is represented on a continuum from 0 to 100, derived by fusing monthly trap catch figures (40%) with larval concentration (60%). The ESN is initially calibrated on the entire body of environmental features to estimate crop performance. Next, isotonic regression is deployed to link infestation intensity with the ESN's positive residual errors, yielding a monotonic penalty mapping. This mapping captures the magnitude of output depression at varying infestation levels. When generating estimates, the inferred penalty is applied to the unadjusted ESN projection, modifying harvest forecasts to incorporate pest-driven losses without changing the foundational ESN configuration. In testing across held-out folds, the FAW-sensitive ESN yields an R² near 0.55 and cuts forecast discrepancies by as much as 67% compared to unadjusted reference models, faithfully reproducing documented harvest declines beyond 20% during major infestation episodes. The approach beats standard regression and deep neural architectures by comparable margins. It supports agriculturalists in directing countermeasures toward high-threat areas, lowering both chemical input volumes and operational expenditures. These outcomes emphasize its promise as a forward-looking alert mechanism for pinpointed actions that curtail agrochemical usage and improve input distribution. Ongoing field assessments will gauge its capacity to scale and its tangible efficacy within maize-growing zones affected by FAW.

A precision spray perception system using LiDAR was designed, algorithmically developed, and experimentally verified to address the problem of low navigation line extraction accuracy in self-propelled sprayers, which causes wheel encroachment on ridges and pesticide overuse. For this perception system, a data processing framework was built encompassing preprocessing, adaptive segmentation separating crops from ditches, and the derivation of navigation lines and crop positioning, all originating from raw LiDAR point cloud species. To validate the system’s stability, field data on cabbages at different growth stages were collected and analyzed. A controllable, constant-speed experimental configuration was set up to benchmark LiDAR against a depth camera within the same field conditions. The trial outcomes reveal that at sprayer speeds of 0.5 and 1 ms⁻¹, the peak lateral deviation reaches 0.112 m within cabbage ridge settings containing inter-row weeds. In comparison, the mean absolute lateral error stands at 0.059 m. Each frame is processed in no more than 43 ms. Compared with the machine vision approach, the proposed technique reduces the mean processing time by 122 ms. In terms of identification accuracy, computational speed, and overall robustness for crop detection and navigation line derivation, the system introduced here outperforms its machine vision counterpart.

Food security early warning systems increasingly draw on artificial intelligence, remote sensing, predictive analytics, climate information, crop monitoring, market indicators, and vulnerability data to identify emerging risks before they become severe crises. These systems are expected to provide timely signals about threats to food availability, access, utilisation, and stability across diverse ecological, economic, and social settings. Yet many early warning approaches remain fragmented. Climate risk, market instability, crop stress, and human vulnerability are often analysed in separate technical workflows, which can weaken interpretation, delay action, or produce alerts that are insufficiently linked to response capacity. This article develops a conceptual architecture for AI-enabled food security early warning systems. The architecture treats early warning as a layered process that connects data ingestion, risk-domain analytics, signal integration, uncertainty interpretation, alert generation, decision support, response targeting, and feedback governance. The proposed architecture explains how multi-source data and predictive models can be translated into interpretable and actionable food security warnings. It also emphasises that AI-enabled early warning can fail when data are incomplete, model outputs are opaque, vulnerable populations are underrepresented, or alerts are disconnected from institutions capable of acting.

Remote sensing and machine learning have become prominent components of smart farming research, generating an expanding body of review literature across agricultural monitoring and prediction applications. This umbrella review synthesises review-level evidence concerning crop monitoring, disease detection, yield forecasting, and decision support while examining the methodological conditions that shape evidence strength and transferability. Peer-reviewed systematic reviews, scoping reviews, structured reviews, surveys, meta-reviews, and other eligible review-level articles were identified through searches of major academic databases and publisher platforms. Evidence was organised by application domain, sensing modality, analytical method, validation design, generalisation, uncertainty, reproducibility, and decision-support relevance. Crop-monitoring reviews describe extensive use of satellite, unmanned aerial vehicle, multispectral, hyperspectral, thermal, and multimodal data for crop mapping, growth assessment, phenotyping, stress monitoring, and related applications. Disease-detection reviews report rapid expansion of image-based machine learning and deep learning, but repeatedly identify data scarcity, class imbalance, curated-image dependence, and limited cross-context validation. Yield-forecasting reviews identify recurring integration of remote sensing, weather, soil, crop-model, and management information, although forecast horizons, spatial and temporal validation, uncertainty communication, and decision relevance remain inconsistent. Across domains, reported technical promise is moderated by heterogeneous datasets, benchmark inconsistency, review overlap, incomplete reproducibility, and limited evidence of transfer across crops, regions, seasons, and acquisition conditions. Review-level evidence supports a substantial research opportunity for remote sensing and machine learning in smart farming, but it does not independently establish field readiness, diagnostic reliability, operational forecasting performance, or deployment readiness. Stronger review reporting, external validation, transparent benchmarking, uncertainty assessment, reproducible workflows, and responsible decision-support evaluation are required.