Now is the time to reimagine agronomic field trials due to the constraints of climate change, shrinking arable land, and the need to feed a growing world population.
Agronomic field trials are conducted to mimic real-life growing conditions and are critical for hypothesis testing, validating the success of a new crop variety, generating new management practices, and establishing the efficacy and safety of new commercial products.
With the use of digital tools, researchers can reimagine the approach and methods used for field trials from early conception and planning all the way to the interpretation and analysis of results.
Trial planning and design
In regard to the design and specifications of field trials, many components must be thought out to limit confounding variables and allow for meaningful conclusions to be made, such as treatment and variety replication, plot randomization, trial layout, and control treatments.
The first step in conducting agronomic field trials is to establish the design and plan requirements with the end goal of the trial is to be able to attribute variability in crop performance to the treatment that’s applied, the climatic condition, or the crop genetics.
Variability in the field characteristics will affect the crop performance, so it’s important to either choose a uniform area or denote the variability so it can be considered in the analysis. Another important planning component is the overall field trial layout, including replication and randomization. These aid in avoiding results that are simply based on coincidence, and not statistical significance.
Data collection
One of the most critical parts of any experiment is data collection. It’s important that data is collected in real-time, as it is impossible to recollect accurate data once the time has passed, especially when dealing with changing weather and agronomic conditions.
When it comes to collecting data on agronomic field trials, it’s essential to conduct quality control to minimize errors. Reducing the amount of missing data and increasing the amount of quality data is an extremely important part of field trials that are often overlooked.
Deploying digital tools for data collection ensures timely reporting, reduced errors, and secure processes to store and aggregate the data for analysis.
Harnessing big data with agro-informatics
With the vast amount of big data that is generated from agronomic field trials, it’s important to unlock the potential of that data. You can unlock the true potential of big data through agro-informatics which deploys data science to drive new innovations, techniques, and scientific knowledge. In previous centuries, agriculture has been revolutionized mechanically, chemically, and biologically.
By leveraging agronomic big data researchers can validate new products and accelerate pipeline development of new technologies that help farmers meet higher yields, better manage pests and diseases, and use resources more efficiently to reduce environmental impact.
Turning data into actionable insights
The last and perhaps my valuable step to reimagine agronomic field trials is turning research data into actionable insights. This is most effectively done by deploying field trial software, such as Agmatix’s Agronomic Trial Management solution, which allows you to easily plan, orchestrate and analyze field trials.
With digital solutions like this, you can accurately scale and design trials, visualize fields and staff activities, enter measurements effortlessly, manage staff, and analyze results in one intuitive platform. At Agmatix, we can standardize your legacy data via our GUARDS (Growers Universal Agronomic Data Standard) protocol, which enables you to unlock true value from that legacy data and to do comparative analysis against your ongoing research.
Reimagine field trials with Agmatix
The Agmatix digital solutions help you reimagine field trials and propel your progress by unlocking true value from your big data to maximize your resources, extend your research capabilities, and empower you with actionable insights. By reimagining your approach to field trials with Agmatix, you can:
- Create value: Accelerate your research, and discover new innovations from existing data to extend the true value of your big data generated from field trials.
- Maximize resources: Leverage legacy study data and optimize data management processes. Deploy streamlined tools and pre-built analytics, to manage your operations at scale and speed time to trial insights. We are big proponents of collaboration and through our agronomic trial management solution, you can share and access data with stakeholders easily due to data standardization and strict data privacy protocols.
- Extend capabilities: We believe analytic capabilities should be for anyone, anywhere! Our intuitive platform equips your team with tools that inspire innovation and easy collaboration, without having to worry about backend computing. With Agmatix, your group is equipped to analyze research insights and reduce the overhead of data collection, aggregation, and synchronization.
- Operationalize insights: Our solutions speed your time from trial planning to insights and increase analysis productivity. This enables you to make data-driven decisions and accelerate new product development.
Today more than ever, adopting digital tools is essential for the next agricultural revolution. By reimagining agronomic experiments and looking outside of “how things have always been done,” your research operations and scope can reach new levels!
