Fine-Tuning General-Purpose Large Language Models for Agricultural Applications:A Reproducible Framework and Evaluation Protocol Based on Qwen3-8B

Abstract

General-purpose large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong abilities in opendomain question answering, information extraction, and text generation. Agricultural applications, however, are domain-specific, region-dependent, time-sensitive, and safety-critical. Without data governance, expert evaluation, and evidence constraints, an agricultural assistant mayproduce unreliable advice on crop diseases, pesticide use, fertilization, or policy interpretation.To avoid presenting unverified simulated numbers as real experimental findings, this paper doesnot report any model-performance claims that have not been produced by an actual training runand expert evaluation. Instead, we propose AgriTune-R, a reproducible and auditable frameworkfor adapting general-purpose LLMs to agricultural tasks. The framework selects the publiclyverifiable Qwen3-8B model as the recommended base model and integrates agricultural datagovernance, instruction construction, LoRA/QLoRA parameter-efficient fine-tuning, retrievalaugmented generation, expert evaluation, and safety control for high-risk questions. The contributions are: (1) a structured workflow for agricultural LLM adaptation; (2) an evaluationprotocol for agricultural knowledge QA, pest and disease consultation, cultivation management,and policy explanation; (3) an expert-review rubric combining factuality, safety, evidence consistency, and uncertainty expression; and (4) a clear separation between protocol design andempirical conclusions, providing an executable baseline for future empirical studies.