Wheat Yield Forecasting in Haryana: A Time Series Approach

India is an agrarian country in which Agriculture is the single most important contributor to the Indian economy because of its significance in food security, trade and industry. Wheat is the most important food grains of human in India. Wheat crop is India’s prime most staple harvest, placed after Rice. It is mostly consumed in the north and northwest parts of the country. At the time of independence in 1947, production and productivity of wheat were quite low at 6.46 million tones and 663 kg/hectare respectively. At present, India is the second largest producer of wheat in world after China. The purpose of this study was to fit a model that forecast the yield of wheat in Haryana by using annual time series data from 1980-81 to 2009-10. Random walk, random walk with drift, linear trend, moving average, simple exponential smoothing and ARIMA models were employed and compared for finding out a best model to forecast the yield of wheat in Haryana. A software Statgraphics is used to forecast the time series data. The best fitted model was selected based on performance in goodness of fit criterion; Akaike Information Criterion (AIC). This study found that on the basis of AIC, ARIMA(0,2,2) be the best model to forecast wheat yield in Haryana. The forecast value of yield was obtained as 4620.91 kg/hectare in 2017, 4669.28 kg/hectare in 2018, 4717.64 kg/hectare in 2019, 4766 kg/hectare in 2020, 4814.37 kg/hectare in 2021 and 4862 kg/hectare in 2022.