Information Modules / Tutorials
Designing Your On-Farm Research Comparison
Everyday you see, read or hear about farming practices that hold promise for increasing the profitability of your farming operation. The question you typically have is, ?Will it work on my farm?? To answer this question you may need to experiment. The experimentation must be conducted in a manner that will produce credible information. Typically, there is much variation in crop performance within a field. Therefore, a side-by-side comparison of two practices does not give reliable information as we cannot know if yield differences or lack of differences are due to the different management practices or to different growing conditions in the two strips or parts of the field. There are some experimental procedures that should be applied to obtain reliable information on alternative practices on your farm. Following these procedures will insure that you, your neighbors, business associates, and others can rely on you will see the value in conducting scientifically based on-farm research. You can easily conduct valid, field-scale on-farm research using your equipment, on your land, employing your operation?s management practices. On-farm research has three basic components: formulating a hypothesis, testing the hypothesis with experimentation, and drawing a conclusion based on the data.