Title: Towards Large Reasoning Models for Agriculture
Primary area: datasets and benchmarks
Keywords: Large Language Models (LLMs), Dataset, Agriculture Benchmark

Abstract: Agricultural decision-making involves complex, context-specific reasoning, where choices about crops, practices, and interventions depend heavily on geographic, climatic, and economic conditions. Traditional large language models (LLMs) often fall short in navigating this nuanced problem due to limited reasoning capacity. We hypothesize that recent advances in large reasoning models (LRMs) can better handle such structured, domain-specific inference. To investigate this, we introduce AgReason, the first expert-curated open-ended science benchmark with 100 questions for agricultural reasoning. Evaluations across eighteen open-source and proprietary models reveal that LRMs outperform conventional ones, though notable challenges persist, with the strongest Gemini–based baseline achieving 36% accuracy. We also present AgThoughts, a large-scale dataset of 44.6K question-answer pairs generated with human oversight and equipped with synthetically generated reasoning traces. Using AgThoughts, we develop AgThinker, a suite of small reasoning models that can be run on consumer-grade GPUs, and show that our dataset can be effective in unlocking agricultural reasoning abilities in LLMs.

TL;DR: We present AgReason, a benchmark for agricultural reasoning, and AgThoughts, a 44.6K QA dataset with reasoning traces. Fine-tuned AgThinker help base models perform better on agriculture-specific questions.