Incubator Farm

Tim Hammerich

News Reporter

With any new ag product, a farmer wants to know how it has performed on an actual farm - not just in trials. To help showcase their crop nutrition products, YARA International has taken the step to start an incubator farm program. Here’s Devin Clarke, who is the permanent crops manager for YARA North America.

Clarke…”We felt a need to explore this concept of an incubator farm so that we could find several collaborators in different regions on different crops. This one that I work on is particularly with almonds. The kind of collaborator that we can make a commitment with for a long period of time - 10 years will be this commitment here - and be able to have greater control and commitment from that collaborator to explore fertility management in the way that we feel is going to help move the industry forward.”

Clarke says the exact program is going to vary from one orchard to another, but he is very happy with the results he is seeing at his almond incubator farm.

Clarke… “What was very exciting this year is, you know, we're looking at close to maybe a dozen different metrics from plant health to disease management to actual yield and ROI at the end of the day. And within the course of one year, very surprisingly, we saw double digit improvements on nearly every single metric that we looked at.”

To learn more about the incubator farm program, visit www.YARA.us