AgroNum & on-farm experimentation
Sustainable agriculture involves the use of innovative inputs. How can these innovations be assayed on-farm? The usual answer is “on-farm experimentation”, or OFE. Some recent reviews by Lacoste et al. 2022 (https://lnkd.in/gkQWxBVg) & Cho et al. 2021 (https://lnkd.in/gU8Y74aE) are quite enlightening. This said, all these OFEs involve some sort of control vs treated strip-plot comparison. For instance, herein figure 1 from Cho et al. 2021. How revolutionary is this mere transposition of conventional experimental protocols … on-farm? A more radical approach would be to do away with cumbersome control & treated plots, and then infer treatment effect directly from the whole plot’s harvested grain yield. Though counter intuitive for some, Polyor SAS’s AgroNum™ N-fertilizer response curves (https://lnkd.in/eBmfT3NM) enable this sort of user-friendly in situ experimentation without any form of design, controls, strip-plots or sub-sampling. This does away with sampling error given the inevitable heterogeneity of agricultural fields. By using such AgroNum™ N-response curves, inter-annual grain yield comparisons from different cropping schedules at different N-fertilization rates can be made. Production & experimentation, all in one. Yours to see.
#agriculturedurable
