Webfra: Web-App for on-Farm Research.

On-Farm Research helps us evaluate the effectiveness of products and practices on individual farms with varied field conditions. Yielding meaningful information from this research requires proper design, accurate operations tracking, and thoughtful analysis.

While there are systems on the market that allow operations data to be imported and organized, the Web-based Farm Research Analyst (WebFRA) is specifically geared toward On-Farm Research and focuses on tools to aid in the creation and analysis of randomized complete block trials and other forms of on-farm trials.

WebFRA is a completely Web-based application, geared toward simplifying the setup, application, and analysis of on-farm trials. WebFRA features an interactive map where users define the location and orientation of the trial. Focused menus help the user define the size and shape of the trial and develop a custom protocol of treatments or practices. These criteria are then used to build a prescription map of the trial and the field surrounding it. The trial can be exported as a shapefile for use in application equipment or other farm management information systems.

In addition to the mapping and trial building interfaces, users may also import field operations and harvest data and analyze crop yield for each experimental treatment. Results of those analyses can be viewed as tabular reports, graphs and maps.

WebFRA also features a protocol creation interface. A set of custom treatments can be created and stored for repeated use on field trials and can be shared with a specific group of users, such as research associates, or kept private.

Users can access all trials and fields they have previously created as well as any protocols they have created or been given access to. Trials created earlier can be modified and exported again as needed.  

WebFRA builds on the concept behind the Enhanced Farm Research Analyst (EFRA) extension for ArcView 3.x. WebFRA takes the tools to the web so users do not need specialized software for establishing and analyzing spatial data.