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Critical Factors Driving Trends in Field Trials Today

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Critical Factors Driving Trends in Field Trials Today

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Over the years, field trials have become a fundamental component of agriculture research and development. With ever-evolving production practices and products, it’s critical to test them in real-world scenarios to evaluate their efficacy and safety. Today, agriculture professionals and farmers conduct approximately 150 million field trials annually to collect valuable data.

Field trial data is a powerful tool that helps researchers understand product performance, safety, and market positioning. Furthermore, it plays a crucial role in addressing the challenges faced by the agriculture industry and society at large.

As we look ahead, field trials will remain a cornerstone of agricultural research. In this blog, we will explore the key trends shaping the future of field trials in agriculture.

Five Ways Field Trials Fuel Future Innovation

1. Optimizing Efficiencies 

Data collected from field trials is crucial to optimizing Agricultural R&D efficiency. Field trials can increase innovation by making data collection more efficient. 

Data collected during field trials is often vast, complex, and heterogeneous. By using IoT sensors, automated data capture field trial software, and other agriculture field trial tools, data collection can be standardized and sped up. This cuts down on human error and makes collected data more accurate and complete. This also enables companies to make more informed decisions about product development, marketing, and commercialization.

Manage and control technical trial operations

Advances in agricultural field trial tech also help manage and control technical trial operations. By efficiently deploying standard operating procedures and protocols, field trials can be executed consistently, reducing variability and improving the reliability of the results. This ensures that the data collected is of high quality, and the products tested are safe, effective, and compliant with regulatory requirements.

Reduce the time and effort required for data wrangling and analysis

Another advantage of leading tech in ag field trials is less wasted time spent wrangling excel sheets between systems and preparing data for analysis. By using integrated systems that automate data transfer and analysis, the data collected during field trials can be easily analyzed and visualized, saving time and effort. This allows the company to focus on deriving insights from the data and making informed decisions about product development, marketing, and commercialization.

Efficient management, control, and monitoring of field trials

The Agmatix platform drives major advances in agricultural field trial tech and optimizes efficiencies. Field trial software helps to manage, control, and monitor more efficiently with task management capabilities. The platform also allows for simple data collection form configuration, allowing for standardized and streamlined data collection. Data collection protocols ensure consistency, increasing the accuracy and completeness of the data collected.

Enhanced efficiency through mobile app 

A data collection mobile app improves the efficiency of field trials by allowing for real-time data capture and reducing human error. The cloud-based system integrations allow for seamless data transfer and analysis, saving time and effort on data wrangling and analysis.

Centralized location for data visualization and analysis

The insights model within the Agmatix platform provides a centralized location for data visualization and analysis, allowing for data-driven decision making. Additionally, the platform’s roadmap includes an AI recommendation engine, which has the potential to further optimize field trial efficiencies by providing intelligent recommendations for trial design.

2. Increasing Data Integrity

Field trials are an integral part of agricultural research and development, providing critical data that is used to optimize agricultural products and practices. However, the accuracy and integrity of data collected during field trials can be compromised by a range of factors, including errors in data entry, inconsistent data collection protocols, and delays in data validation. 

To address these challenges, advances in agricultural field trial tech enable real-time data collation and validation at the trial level which increases the integrity of collected data by reducing the likelihood of errors and inconsistencies. By leveraging modern technologies such as IoT sensors, mobile data capture, and other agriculture field trial tools, data can be collected in real-time, reducing the time and effort required for data entry and improving the accuracy and completeness of the data collected.

Furthermore, real-time data validation at the trial level can assist in identifying errors or inconsistencies in data as they occur, allowing for immediate corrective action. This reduces the vulnerability of collected data to errors and inconsistencies, which can have an impact on subsequent analysis, insights, and reporting.

By utilizing advanced field trial technologies that enable real-time data collation and validation, agricultural research and development organizations can increase the accuracy and integrity of their field trial data. This, in turn, leads to more accurate and reliable insights and recommendations, improving the efficiency and effectiveness of agricultural research and development.

Agmatix is leading advancements in agricultural field trial tech and offers a range of capabilities that improve the accuracy and integrity of field trial data. These capabilities include easy configuration of data collection forms, predefined data collection protocols, a mobile app for data collection, data visualization and validations, and error handling.

With easy configuration of data collection forms and predefined data collection protocols, data can be collected in a standardized and streamlined way, reducing the likelihood of errors and inconsistencies. The mobile app for data collection enables real-time data capture, reducing the time and effort required for data entry and improving the accuracy and completeness of collected data.

Agmatix’s data validations and error handling capabilities enable users to identify errors or inconsistencies in data as they occur, enabling corrective action to be taken immediately. The platform also uses its own GUARDS data standard ontologies to standardize the collected data and ensure it’s consistent and compliant with industry standards.

In addition to data validations and error handling, Agmatix also offers trial insights that provide a centralized location for data visualization and analysis, enabling data-driven decision making. 

Finally, Agmatix’s cloud-based solution offers real-time data collection visualization, allowing stakeholders to monitor field trials via desktop, tablet, and mobile applications. This ensures accurate and consistent data collection throughout the trial.

Overall, Agmatix’s capabilities in advanced field trial technology are designed to increase the accuracy and integrity of field trial data, reducing the likelihood of errors and inconsistencies that can impact later analysis, insights, and reporting. With these capabilities, agricultural research and development organizations can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their field trials, leading to more accurate and reliable insights and recommendations.

3. Data Collaboration and Interoperability

Technology has made it possible to increase data collaboration and interoperability in agricultural field trials. Improved trial data stewardship leads to better knowledge discovery and innovation, which is critical for advancing agricultural research and development.

One of the key advancements in field trial technology is the increase in data interoperability between data sets. By utilizing standardized data formats and protocols, different data sets can be easily combined and analyzed, leading to new insights and discoveries. 

This also allows trial owners to easily share data access with multiple stakeholders, enabling researchers, agronomists, and other professionals to access the same data sets and collaborate on research and development projects.

Moreover, advances in field trial technology have enabled the reuse of data across the organization to improve collaboration. By leveraging modern technologies such as cloud-based data storage and sharing platforms, data can be easily leveraged across different departments and teams, enabling researchers and other professionals to access and use the same data sets for cross-trial analysis. 

The Agmatix platform plays a significant role in increasing data collaboration and interoperability in agricultural field trials. One of the key capabilities of the Agmatix platform is its ability to provide a multi-stakeholder view of a single trial and its analysis. 

This means that researchers, agronomists, and other professionals can access and analyze the same data sets based on the permissions set by the organization’s trial administrator. This makes it easier for people to work together and reduces the chance of mistakes or inconsistencies.

The platform also offers insight workspaces with data collaboration and sharing capabilities, enabling stakeholders to work together on research and development projects, share insights, and collaborate in real time. This feature facilitates data collaboration and interoperability by providing a central location where stakeholders can access and analyze data sets.

Agmatix also uses its GUARDS data standard ontologies to ensure that collected data is standardized, which increases data interoperability between different data sets. This helps researchers and other professionals to combine and analyze different data sets more easily, leading to new insights and discoveries.

Furthermore, Agmatix’s platform includes the Axiom data lake, a cloud-based storage and sharing platform that provides secure data storage and facilitates data reuse across the organization for better collaboration. This feature ensures that data can be safely shared across different departments and teams, allowing stakeholders to access and utilize the same data sets.

4. Risk Reduction for Field Trial Operators 

Technology is essential for reducing risk in agricultural field trials by identifying data collection issues, outliers, and sensor defects during the trial process. Advanced data analytics and machine learning algorithms enable trial operators to detect and address problems in real time, mitigating major data collection errors or inaccuracies.

Leveraging historical data with machine learning algorithms helps optimize trial operations, reduce the risk of failure, and avoid the need to replicate trials based on findings already leveraged from historical data. Utilizing cloud-based services reduces the cost and complexity of managing IT infrastructure and allows easier integration between systems, reducing customizations over time.

The Agmatix platform provides field trial operators with executive dashboards for real-time visibility into trial operations and data, including advanced analytics capabilities to identify trends and patterns for optimizing operations and improving outcomes. Features to exclude anomalies and outliers and tools for data validation and error handling ensure accurate and reliable data.

The digital twin feature, an upcoming addition to the Agmatix platform, creates a virtual model of the field trial environment, allowing operators to test and optimize different scenarios before implementing them in the real world.

As a cloud-based and flexible software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, the Agmatix technology platform offers field trial operators a powerful tool for managing and optimizing their operations. It provides them with the information needed to make informed decisions quickly and effectively.

You may be interested in:
Next Generation Field Trials are Data-Driven
Boosting Agricultural Output: The Impact of Digital Transformation and Data Analysis in Field Trials
Revolutionizing Field Trials: Unleashing the Power of Advanced Cloud-Based
Solutions

Going Digital: The New Generation of Field Trials

As agriculture continues to move towards digitalization, technology is playing a more important role than ever in field trials. With the tap of a tablet or cell phone, we can leverage leading tech to increase efficiency and accuracy. Cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions, web-based platforms, and mobile apps make it easy to plan and map field trials, collect data, and communicate with others involved in the trial. By utilizing a single centralized platform, collaboration becomes seamless and efficiency is increased.

Agmatix understands the challenges of planning and executing field trials and the importance of impactful data. That’s why they offer an Agronomic Trial Management solution with end-to-end capabilities that support planning, executing, analyzing, and managing field trials. Their mobile application, with online and offline capabilities, supports field trials from anywhere, making it easier to identify errors and data gaps sooner and keep the trial data collection on track.

The results from agriculture field trials powered by precision farming tools will inform innovation that can address food scarcity, feed a growing population, and better manage agriculture’s carbon footprint. Companies must increase the pace and efficiency of agriculture field trials to remain competitive and bring new products to market that will improve sustainable agriculture.

As technology continues to advance in the agricultural field trial industry, it will bring greater efficiency to these important efforts and unlock their true value. With its cutting-edge technology tools and solutions for ag field trials, Agmatix is committed to helping its customers extract actionable insights at the field level.

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