Farmers are routinely presented with an array of products and approaches that promise to improve their operation. It is not uncommon for a farmer to receive samples of new products from their suppliers which, if properly documented, could be treated as on-farm research trials. The potential to evaluate a decision at the time of harvest is a moment that often goes unrealized by farmers because they did not have the means to quickly and properly document the trial or perhaps even because the data must be exported and taken to a computer to analyze.

The Trials Tracker app is an open-source tool that aims to empower farmers by streamlining the process of analyzing their yield data. The app encourages farmers to investigate their options by allowing them to quantifiably compare the results of their trials. The app also aims to demonstrate OADA’s vision of improved synchronization between data sources and the tools used to inform management decisions.

Through a simple note-taking interface, users may describe the trial before drawing a polygon of the trial area on a map. After harvest, the user is presented with the average yield value associated with each trial which they may then compare to the rest of the field across one or more years. Users may also tag their trials with their own descriptors and compare across trials by these tags. A demo OADA server will host real farm yield data to demonstrate the flow of yield data to the app, even allowing for real-time access to data as it is harvested and uploaded to the cloud.