Automating On-Farm Trials

Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
Every field is different. For a farmer to know what products and practices work best for your field, it would sure be nice to have some on-farm trials. Nick Cizek created FarmTest as a seamless way to deploy field trials without interfering with the commercial operation.
Cizek… “We want to make it so that you have to go and apply your fertilizer, or you have to apply your starter, or you have to plant your seeds. And let's do that using a variable rate prescription. So it will automatically build a trial for you. And when you get to the field, it executes. So we work in inputs where you can apply them with a variable rate prescription. And then we also, we work in crops that have a yield monitor because we don't want someone to have to go out and weigh or anything like that. We just want to make it really easy to collect the data. And so, yeah, we work in crops with yield monitors and that's the data that we analyze to figure out which of the management practices pays off the best.”
Dr. Mike Castellano, co-founder of the Iowa Nitrogen Initiative is using FarmTest with farmer collaborators to analyze optimal fertilizer applications across several fields in Iowa.
Castellano… “The Precision Fertilizer Management or, you know, any variable rate application beyond just nitrogen allows them to download the prescription from the cloud. They basically hit go and then all they have to do is send us that as applied nitrogen map at the end of the season as well as the harvest data. We take those data and we match them up and that's when we really begin to do the science.”
Learn more at farmtest.ag.