In today’s era of high input costs, low margins and the ever-increasing need to improve sustainability of the farm operation, validating agronomic management decisions made on-farm are ever-more important. Agronomic recommendations are usually generated by small-plot research, which can efficiently and effectively compare numerous treatments in the same location, at the same time. But what happens when those treatments are used at a field scale? Do they behave the same? Are they just as effective? Are they economical? On-farm trials can help answer these questions.
On-farm research is done by the farmer, for the farmer. Well-conducted on-farm trials investigate questions and outcomes on a case-by-case basis while evaluating the overall effects of management decisions through combining data across trial locations and years.
Facilitating trials to generate meaningful results is a balance between our efforts and farmer efforts. For farmers, there is time involved in conducting the trials on-farm, particularly at seeding and harvest, two of the busiest times of the growing season. But this investment of time generates valuable information on the agronomics and economics of different management practices and products. Results from on-farm trials can be used to shift management practices or validate current practices on individual farms, but they can also be pooled together across space and time to gain an overall, big-picture understanding of the impact of a treatment or decision.
This would not be possible without you, our farmer collaborators. Thank you for your dedication to these trials!
Thank-you to our On-Farm Network collaborators:
- Farmer-members
- Tone Ag Consulting
- New Era Ag Research
- Green Aero Tech
- Assiniboine College
- BASF
- UPL
- Corteva
- Bayer Crop Science