Alternatives to EAV model
EAV is a solution when the values to be stored cannot be identified during design-time but are captured at run-time. It sounds like your situation is slightly different - you know all the values to be captured but not how to store them.

One relational approach is to use entity inheritance. This is what you describe with generic_input and potato_input etc. Since each crop will have exactly one row in the generic table and exactly one row in a single specific table this inheritance can be flattened into a view for consumption by the models.

If you don't know until run-time which values each model will consume you can introduce a model_attribute table to list each model's requirements. Use dynamic SQL to construct the SELECT from the above flattened view.

The data could be stored in general-purpose columns. The input table then becomes create table input(crop, value_1, value_2, value_3, .. value_n). Further meta-data maps crops to columns' meanings e.g. "for wheat value_1 is planting date; for poppies value_1 is flowering date". This design is good if you really like logic puzzles and debugging.

It is only a small step to unpivot that table to get input(crop, value_number, value). Then substitue the column meanings for value_number to give input(crop, attribute, value) and you have EAV.

My experience with EAV is that it is really rubbish for queries with predicates ("select planting_date where flowering_date = 1st August") but are fine for retrieving all values for a thing ("select * from EAV where entity_id = xyz"). It's left to the application to make sense of the bucket of values that are returned, but it will do a better job than SQL.

EAV is a dynamic schema solution. Others that are better supported by DBMS are XML and JSON. These allow each row of a table to hold values that other rows don't. Depending on the DB software the JSON/XML can be parsed as part of the SQL query. You don't say, but maybe your models accept inputs in one of these formats, too? Of the two JSON is more compact and XML has a richer parsing &amp; query ecosystem.