Despite recent advances in artificial intelligence for agriculture, reliable crop recommendation remains constrained by limited access to soil diagnostics, insufficient integration of environmental context, and the absence of transparent, quantitative evaluation frameworks. This study addresses the research question: How can we integrate multiple indicators to generate accurate, explainable, and context-sensitive crop recommendations? To this end, we propose a multimodal decision-support framework that combines image-based soil texture classification with geospatial, and climatic information. A convolutional neural network was trained on a curated dataset of 3250 soil images aggregated from four publicly available sources, covering four primary soil texture classes, alongside tabular soil and nutrient data. The model was evaluated using 5-fold stratified cross-validation, achieving an average classification accuracy of 99.30% (standard deviation ≈ 0.66), and was further validated on an independent hold-out test set to assess generalization performance. To enhance practical applicability, the framework incorporates elevation, rainfall, temperature, and major soil nutrients, and employs a large language model to generate user-oriented, interpretable justifications for each recommendation. Crop recommendations were quantitatively evaluated using a novel Agronomic Suitability Score (ASS), which measures alignment across soil compatibility, climatic suitability, seasonal alignment, and elevation tolerance. Across six geographically diverse case studies, the framework achieved mean ASS values ranging from 3.76 to 4.96, with five regions exceeding 4.45, demonstrating strong agronomic validity, robustness, and scalability. A Streamlit-based application further illustrates the system’s ability to deliver accessible, location-aware, and explainable agronomic guidance. The results indicate that the proposed approach constitutes a scalable decision-support tool with significant potential for sustainable agriculture and food security initiatives.
Youssef et al. (Fri,) studied this question.