Crop yield prediction is among the most important and main sources of income in the Indian economy. In this paper, the improved cat swarm optimization (ICSO) based recurrent neural network (RNN) model is proposed for crop yield prediction using time series data. The inertia weight parameter is added to position equation that is selected randomly, and a new velocity equation is produced which enhances the searching ability in the best cat area. By using inertia weight, the ICSO enhances performance of feature selection and obtains better convergence in minimum iteration. The RNN is applied to produce direct graph using sequence of data and decides current layer output by involving all other existing calculations. The performance of the model is estimated using coefficient of determination (R2), root mean square error (RMSE), mean squared error (MSE), and mean absolute error (MAE) on the yield from the years 2011 to 2021 with an annual prediction for 120 records of approximately 8 million nuts. The evaluated result shows that the proposed ICSO-RNN model delivers metrics such as R2, MAE, MSE, and RMSE values of 0.99, 0.77, 0.68, and 0.82 correspondingly, which ensures accurate yield prediction when compared with the existing methods which are hybrid reinforcement learning-random forest (RL-RF) and machine learning (ML) methods.