Accurate forecasting of agricultural production is essential for managing food supply chains, guiding policy decisions, and building resilience against climate variability. However, modeling long-range, country-level crop production remains challenging due to temporal complexity, nonlinear dependencies, and the need for highly generalizable prediction systems. This study addresses these challenges by developing a hybrid forecasting framework that combines deep learning architectures with metaheuristic hyperparameter optimization. A global dataset spanning tomato and potato production from 1961 to 2021 was used to evaluate multiple forecasting models, including Informer, N-BEATS, LogTrans, N-HITS, EALSTM, TST, and LSTM. The Informer model achieved the best baseline performance (RMSE = 0.0799; NSE = 0.9070) and was selected for optimization. A comparative analysis was conducted using several metaheuristic algorithms, with particular focus on the Football Optimization Algorithm (FbOA), a novel strategy inspired by cooperative team dynamics. FbOA delivered the highest gains across all evaluated metrics, reducing RMSE to 0.00109, MSE to 1.19×10−6, and increasing NSE to 0.9260, R2 to 0.9600, and the correlation coefficient r to 0.9550. These results confirmed that metaheuristic tuning substantially enhances the forecasting capability of deep models, particularly when guided by domain-inspired search logic. The proposed framework demonstrates strong potential for integration into real-time, AI-driven agricultural decision support systems, offering scalable solutions for food security planning, climate-smart agriculture, and long-term sustainability forecasting.
link
https://doi.org/10.54216/JAIM.110207