On-Farm Research
Today's farmers have access to more tools and technology than ever before. Biologicals, enhanced genetics, a variety of fertilizer sources, more effective ag chemicals and precision ag technologies all have the potential to make agriculture more efficient, but how do you know what works on your farm?
Conducting your own On-Farm Research helps you identify products and practices that are effective on your fields.
Framing the Question
Yielding meaningful information from your On-Farm Research requires proper planning and thoughtful design. PAQ has developed a suite of custom On-Farm Research services and tools to help quickly and accurately plan, perform and review your own On-Farm Research Trials.
Some typical trials you might want to run include:
- Nitrogen Fertilizer Rates
- Seed Population Rates
- Starter Fertilizer vs. No Starter Fertilizer
- Split Fertilizer Applications
- Fungicide Treatments
- Fertilizer Timing
- Nitrogen Stabilizers
- Fertilizer Product comparisons
Designing an Optimized Trial
We design trials optimized for you based on information about your field, your goals, and your farming equipment.
We utilize resources such as aerial photography, soil survey maps, and previous year's yield maps to help select areas of your field suitable for trial placement.
Plot dimension and arrangement are customized to fit your field, farming equipmet, and practices, and can be quickly modified by our staff if your choice of application equipment changes.
Our goal is to provide you with a sound On-Farm Research trial plan that yields meaningful information you can use on your farm. One key to this is utilizing a sound treatment plan; limiting the number of variables between plots and replicating each treatment enough times to account for natural field variability, application problems or chance.
We will work with you to create a treatment plan for your On-Farm Research trial based on established research principles and years of experience. Treatment plan maps are delivered to you in the file format of your choice, and our staff can create prescription files for all well known brands of application controllers.
Working with Your Data
One key benefit to the PAQ On-Farm Research process is our analysis of your As-Applied data. We utilize this data to ensure that your treatments were applied as planned.
If application didn't match the plan, we use the As-Applied data to modify the trial plan to reflect what really happened in the field.
We create application and harvest maps using data we extract from a copy of your 'data card' or data that you export from your farm information management syetem. Our staff can extract data from log files created by all well known brands of Application Controllers and Yield Monitors, taking care of this task for you.
Yield and As-Applied data are first inspected for any errors or anomolies and cleaned of them to ensure only reliable data are used in our analyses.
Presenting the Answer
After cleaning and preparing your field operations data, we perform an analysis of yield and treatments applied within your On-Farm Research trial.
This analysis produces maps of treatments, average yield by treatment, and tables and charts showing how yield varied between treatments, between replications of treatments and compared to the check plots.
These maps and descriptive statistics will tell you if the experimental treatments had an effect on yield and to what level.
We Deliver
Services and Products that we deliver include:
Planning maps
- Soil map
- Field boundary
- Aerial photography
- Research plan map
Field operations map
- Practices performed vs. prescribed
- Cleaned yield map of field
- Average yield for each practice
Data management
- Creation of controller files
- Extraction and mapping of field operations data
- Extraction and mapping of harvest data
- Cleaning of field operations and harvest data
Summary charts and tables
- Table of average yield and range for each practice
- Descriptive charts comparing each practice
- Descriptive statistics of trial
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Why Work With PAQ?
PAQ has been supporting On-Farm Research projects for more than 18 years, and has worked with clients ranging from local farmers to global agribusiness corporations. PAQ also runs several Agriculture conferences including InfoAg, the Indianna Certified Crop Adviser Annual Conference, and the International Conference on Precision Agriculture, where we help many of today's leading scientists and agronomists share their research and recommendations with hundreds of today's leading farmers and agriculture practicioners.
Our Analytics staff have experience in Agriculture, and have studied Geography, GIS, and Environmental Science and have performed their own scientific studies and field work in addition to working at PAQ.
Using a combination of scientific backgrounds, real-world experience, and learning from others, we've developed a research methodology that's scientifically sound yet flexible enough to adapt to the realities of field work.
We love learning and are excited to use our tools and experience to help you study new ideas efficiently and effectively this season.
If you have an interest in setting up a trial on your farm, contact us today at (217) 762-7955 or email us at: ofr@paqinteractive.com.
Your Data, Empowered
All the data and analysis from the trial is yours. We will not share the data with others unless we have written permission from you to do so.
We can archive a copy of the data for you or scrub our system of your files when the trial is over.