How it works

AdikeCast forecasts the weekly arecanut price 12 weeks ahead for New Variety (hosa chali), Old Variety (hale chali) and Coca in five Dakshina Kannada mandis: Mangaluru, Bantwal, Puttur, Sullia and Belthangady. It turns the forecast into a plain sell-or-hold signal for a farmer holding dried nuts.

Prices: Agmarknet, via the Government of India open data API (data.gov.in), plus historical Agmarknet or CEDA exports for backfill. Rainfall: Open-Meteo historical weather for Mangaluru. A scheduled job fetches new data every evening at 19:30 IST, retrains, and republishes the site.

The weekly price is the median of the week's daily modal prices, which dampens single-day outliers. Gaps of up to three weeks are carried forward; longer gaps stay empty and the market is flagged as stale.

One gradient-boosted tree model is trained on all markets and varieties together. It predicts the log change in price over 1 to 12 weeks from recent price moves and volatility, how the price moved over the same weeks in the last two years, the time of year, rainfall against its usual level, and arrivals where available.

The model predicts three quantiles (P10, P50, P90). Their spread is then calibrated with conformal prediction on past errors, so the shaded range contains the real outcome about 80% of the time. The Accuracy page shows how it compares with ARIMA and two simple baselines on data it had not seen.

Waiting costs money. By default we assume 0.5% of the stock is lost per month in storage and 12% a year interest on the cash you could have today. The calculator lets you enter your own numbers.

For each week ahead we compute the net gain of waiting and the probability that it beats selling today. If the best week's expected gain is below 3%, the signal is Sell now. If it is above and the probability is at least 65%, it is Hold. Otherwise it is Sell part: sell about half now and hold the rest.

Forecasts are estimates. Your price depends on quality, moisture and the buyer. The model cannot foresee sudden shocks such as import policy changes or pest outbreaks, so always confirm the day's rate before selling.

The Kannada text was drafted for this project and is awaiting review by a native speaker from the district.