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Objectives of the project
Objectives of the project
The hypothesis of this project is that digital agronomy tools can make it easier and less risky for farmers to experiment with soil health improvements in grain production. By providing useful data, helping organize it, and analyzing the results, these tools aim to support farmers in making better decisions.
The specific objectives are to
form a group of at least 10 farms experimenting on methods to improve soil health (reduced tillage, cover crops, etc.),
generate a comprehensive database that will allow for single farm interpretation and multi-farm trend and pattern analysis, and
determine if this process allows farmers to learn more from their experimentation as compared to their normal experimentation process.
What's in it for farmers?
You lead your experiment: You decide what and how to test, and we work alongside you to help you get the most out of it through digital agronomy.
Enhanced Insights: Collecting additional agronomic and contextual data (e.g., soil maps, weather, remote sensing) will provide deeper understanding of experiment results.
Expert Support: Farmers will receive assistance from data science and agronomy experts to organize and analyze their experiment data, generating farm-specific digital evidence.
Collaborative Learning: Pooling data from a network of farms (10 or more) will contextualize outcomes across diverse conditions, making unreplicated experiments more interpretable.
Explainable Outcomes: Even unexpected results (e.g., lower yields) will offer learning opportunities, as the additional support helps explain unforeseen outcomes.
We have not yet reached our target number of participants for the 2027 season and are still accepting participants. We will adjust to your way of experimenting and we can help design your experiment. Fill out the Experiment Card to register your experiment. We will then contact you to discuss what samples should be collected.
We currently have resources to support your experiment. Sign up now to benefit from samples collected on your own experiment. The link will be disabled when all samples have been claimed.
Soil samples
You may need information on current soil health to support and inform your experiment. We have 60 soil samples available for this project. This means that we can visit your farm, collect the samples and send them for analysis. Sampling location, timing, and specific analysis will be decided with you to support your experiment.
Biomass samples
Similarly, you may need information on biomass N concentration to support and inform your experiment. We have 100 biomass samples available for this project. This means that we can visit your farm, collect the samples and send them for analysis. Sampling location, timing, and specific analysis will be decided with you to support your experiment.
Funding
Funding
This project is funded by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), through the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research & Education (NE SARE) program under subaward number PG26-023.
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