Price forecasting and span commercialization opportunities for Mexican agricultural products

Abstract

Decision-making based on data analysis leads to knowing market trends and anticipating risks and opportunities. These allow farmers to improve their production plan as well as their chances to get an economic success. The aim of this work was to develop a methodology for price forecasting of fruits and vegetables using Queretaro state, MX as a case study. The daily prices of several fruits and vegetables were extracted, from January 2009 to February 2019, from the National System of Market Information. Then, these prices were used to compute the weekly average price of each product and their span commercialization in Q4 and over the median of historical data. Moreover, product characterization was performed to propose a methodology for future price forecasting of multiple agricultural products within the same mathematical model and it resulted in the identification of 18 products that fit the Seasonal Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average (SARIMA) model. Finally, future price estimation and validation was performed to explain the product price fluctuations between weeks and it was found that the relative error for most of products modeled was less than 10%, e.g., Hass avocado (7.01%) and Saladette tomato (8.09%). The results suggest the feasibility for the implementation of systems to provide information for better decisions by Mexican farmers.