Agrimetrics is seeking expressions of interest in a crop yield competition they are looking to run. Please get in touch with matthew.smith@agrimetrics.co.uk if interested
Do you think you could accurately predict the average UK winter wheat yield for 2021? Then we have a competition for you!
Agrimetrics is looking to run a prediction market on Hivemind’s Agora platform. Competitors will place bids throughout the year on the official DEFRA figures for the average UK Winter Wheat yield (tonnes/hectare).
Teams would choose whatever method they want to predict the yields. They’d receive virtual credits which they invest in their chosen outcomes, the prices of which adjust to reflect supply and demand. Participants would buy and sell virtual contracts at any time, typically choosing to invest in undervalued outcomes. When the official outcome is announced, teams receive full credit when they predict the correct outcome, with the winner being the team who obtains the most credits.
We want to focus initially on crop yields as a classic yet ongoing challenge. Early insights on yields has been valuable to the agrifood sector for decades, influencing market prices, supply chain planning and crop research. Recently the challenge has increased due to climate change and other stressors causing volatile yields. Prediction markets provide an exciting new approach to the challenge – harnessing collective intelligence to produce an ensemble prediction.
Agrimetrics is partnering with Weather Logistics to provide supporting data for the competition although it is up to the participating teams whether they use that data or not. This reflects another exciting dimension to the challenge: that many more possible data sources that could be used to inform predictions are now available.
We want to run the competition as an experiment to establish levels of interest and approaches to prediction markets for agricultural yield predictions.
By participating you would be part of the first every competition of its kind for agriculture. If you’re interested in participating, please fill in this application form: https://hvmd.io/agora/yield-21-sign-up-form or contact Matthew as above for more information.