Making the most of on-farm trials
October 21, 2021
You’ve put the work in, done your homework and completed a season’s worth of field trials. Good work. Field trials are an incredibly valuable tool to help farmers learn which inputs perform best and seed grows best in their unique soil and atmospheric conditions. Once you’ve completed the trials however, how can you be sure you’re putting all the data you’ve collected to work, in order to maximize returns on all of your hard work? We’ve got 5 big ideas.
5 ways to capitalize on trial data
1. Post-Harvest Calibration Tools
As with most things in farming, the first step is the most important. In this case, you want to make sure the data you’ve collected is accurate. Thankfully, the post-harvest calibration tools that come with the FieldView Cab App make that as easy as a warm Sunday morning. Using the tools, farmers can adjust post-harvest yields at the whole field level, or combine-by-combine for larger fields where multiple combines were used.
2. SplitView Tool
Seeing is believing! Which is what makes Climate FieldViewTM’s SplitView function such an incredible tool for comparing what you’ve planted or sprayed with what you’ve harvested. Essentially, SplitView lets you view two maps simultaneously. Compare your yield map with planting, application or FHI maps, and watch as they move in tandem for a quick and easy visual reference into how well your trial panned out.
3. Field Region Reports
As any farmer knows, no two fields, regions or rows ever grow the same. Inputs that delivered results on the northeast quarter might have failed on the southeast, etc. This is what makes Field Region Reports so useful as a post-harvest analysis tool. Generating a Field Region report can help crunch data on how yields were impacted in regions that were treated differently over the season.
4. Identifying Yield-Limiting Factors
In addition to how you may have treated your fields yourself, Field Region Reports can also provide insight into how factors outside of your control may have impacted trial yields. You can use the tool to generate maps detailing factors like biomass levels, then analyze all the data for easy cross-referencing with how they affected crop performance.
5. Yield Analysis
And now—the piece de resistance—FieldView’s valuable analysis tool. Once you’ve collected all your seed planting and harvest data, it’s time to analyze it all for a full evaluation of all the decisions you made over the season—good and bad. Using the tool can provide valuable insights into what went right or wrong, to help you make sense of the past season, so you can plan for the one coming up. It all comes down to ensuring next year is better than the last.
Whether you use all the tools we’ve mentioned or not, the importance of field trials can’t be underestimated. Experience, as they say, is the best teacher. With Climate FieldView in your toolkit, you can ensure that the lessons you learn are as accurate and profitable as possible. Happy farming!