One of the best ways to improve as a farmer is to experiment with different products and application and seeding rates. Following harvest, you collect and analyze the data, and now you have data from your own ground to use in the decision-making process.
The problem is setting up and managing on-farm trials simply takes a lot of time, and farmers are already busy. Therefore, many rely on third-party and university research for a product’s performance data that ultimately determines whether or not they adopt it.
University of Illinois agricultural and consumer economics professor David Bullock seems to have an answer, known as the Data Intensive Farm Management Project (DIFM).
Started in 2016, the collaboration between university researchers, private crop consultants, retailers and farmers has helped conduct scientific, large-scale farm trials in Illinois, Kansas, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Texas, Washington, Argentina, Brazil and South Africa.
“It’s going to sound intimidating, to do science on their own farm, but it’s really not intimidating,” Bullock says. “It’s really user friendly, either for farmers themselves who are a little tech savvy, or we can work with their crop consultants, and we can design and run really big trials on their farms and help them get excellent data. The only way to learn more about your farm is to get on-farm data.”
The National Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) and USDA provide the bulk of funding to DIFM — over 20 land-grant universities are signed on as collaborators — to help farmers conduct scientific experiments on their fields.
Here’s the kicker: no matter the result, the farmer is guaranteed not to lose any money. If money or yield is lost on a trial, the project has a mechanism in place where the farmer will be made financially whole again, Bullock says.
What Do I Need To Do?
Basically, a farmer needs to dedicate a minimum of 80 acres and have a calibrated yield monitor and equipment featuring variable-rate application (VRA) technology with GPS.
“It could be any type of nitrogen — whether synthetic, biological, whatever it is — it could be seeding rates or variable rating different products,” Bullock says. “ If it can be applied at variable rates, it’s something we can look at.”
The DIFM team can take an 80-acre field, remove the headlands and slice and dice the remaining 65 acres into up to 400 different observation areas, or field trials.
They also help collect and clean the data before analyzing the output and showing the farmer which variable-rate strategies worked, and which ones did not using real data, right from their own fields and soil types.
“And we can do that at the click of a button,” Bullock says. “Right now, it is still a research project, so it’s not perfected. If a farmer is going to work with us, they need to know this is research. It’s not perfect, but boy, we think we can get better. And it doesn’t cost them any money. It does take a little bit of effort, but for a lot of farmers, it’s not a lot of effort, and they learn some great stuff.”
One takeaway that has emerged from DIFM trials is variable-rate fertility programs really only pencil out in scenarios that have either high soil type variability or elevation shifts. Wide-open, flat and homogenous fields — like many of the fields located around Champaign, Ill., where Bullock is based out of, for example, do not typically pay off in VRA scenarios.
“Historically there has been insufficient data on yield responses (from VRA) and how they vary across different parts of fields,” Bullock says. “This makes it difficult to create effective variable-rate prescriptions based on quantifiable data rather than general, often outdated rules of thumb.”
Bullock adds that all farm trial data generated within DIFM always belongs to the farmer. The data might be aggregated and used in academia with the farmer’s permission.
Farmer Endorsement
Ohio farmer Jim Uphaus says, in his experience, most on-farm trials run by farmers start off on solid ground, but then the farmer gets busy or sidetracked elsewhere, and aspects of the trial that shouldn’t fall through the cracks end up doing so.
That’s why the 300-acre northwest Ohio row crop farmer and former plant breeder is so excited to get started with the DIFM project.
“The tools and everything they’re developing really meshes well with the farmer, basically all they have to do is make sure everything is turned on and they start planting or applying in the right spot,” Uphaus says. “It really simplifies things because it’s basically end to end, from initial design all the way through data analysis.”
His plan is to have DIFM assist him in laying down a multitude of cover crop seeding rate trials, so he will definitively know from here on out how cover crop planting density affects future yields on his own ground.
“Every year we learn more, and yet we have so much data we’re not currently using, or we’re basing these major decisions on outdated data,” Uphaus says. “With this project we’re really going to focus on mining our old data to help drive these trial designs, and then allow the data to validate or contradict our old approaches.”
With harvest 2024 in the books (or oh so close), Bullock says now is the time to reach out and explore whether working with the DIFM team is a good fit for your farm trials.
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