Estimating the impacts of environmental management on strawberry yield using publicly available agricultural data in South Korea

Abstract

Advanced information and communication technologies have made data collection more efficient, and crop growth, yield, and environmental data of multiple farms can be used for various purposes. Using the publicly available database in South Korea, we investigated the correlation between the management of greenhouse environments and the pattern of strawberry yield during harvest seasons. Location-specific datasets were merged and processed, and mixed-effects models were applied to account for both observable greenhouse conditions and unobserved factors associated with farm locations. Instead of using averaged temperature and relative humidity inside greenhouses, we estimated the percent of time that air temperature has been between 15°C and 20°C, denoted by T%, and the percent of time that relative humidity has been between 0% and 50%, denoted by H%. The strawberry yield tends to reduce with respect to time during a harvest season, but the reduction rate is slower when the T% and H% are higher. This study provides empirical evidence for the practical significance of maintaining air temperature and relative humidity within an optimal range, and we conclude that growers can mitigate loss of production by the maintenance of air temperature and relatively humidity particularly during the later phase of a harvest season.