Technical and Social Guidelines for Effective on-Farm Research.

Performing research across thousands of farms at a field scale has become feasible due to yield monitors on combines. Farmer networks to perform on-farm research have been created in the Corn Belt to take advantage of this new capability, which enables collection of datasets sufficiently large to greatly improve recommendations for field-level practices provided to farmers. Current recommendations do not provide the probability the recommendation will be successful on individual fields because it has been too expensive to collect that much data on a field-scale. Farmers can make much more informed decisions if recommendations included the probability of the recommendation succeeding. Because farmer networks are the key to collection of datasets of sufficient size to calculate the probabilities of success of a recommendation, guidelines for the technical and social aspects of farmer are needed. Technical guidelines include such information as the design and analysis of trials run by farmer networks, methods to clean raw data from the combines, and methods minimize errors in the field. Social guidelines include protocols for data stewardship, which is a general term covering many topics including minimum data requirements, handling, sharing, and access to individual plot results, as well as the confidentially of the results, and protocols for use of the aggregate data in education programs. This presentation will briefly discuss technical guidelines used by farmer networks in the Corn Belt, but the majority of the presentation will discuss the need for and benefits of establishing social guidelines for farmer networks.