Every new product that someone is trying to sell you comes standard with a claim. Companies are eager to let farmers know exactly how many more bushels per acre their new concoctions are going to deliver. For any company that’s being honest, there has to be some science behind the numbers. And that’s where research comes into play. As a farmer, can you trust company-sponsored research? Or are the trial results often cooked and the claims too good to be true? Those are the questions we put to Nate Firle, owner of AgRevival. 

Private vs. Public Research Studies

Well, you’re right: every company does need that number or numbers that they can stick on a flyer and hand to customers. When you ask about company-sponsored research, or what I call ‘funded research’, there are two categories: the private and the public studies. 

Before going to market, a company needs to figure out the correct rate of its product or other really specific details around what its product or piece of equipment is. In this case, a company is paying someone to provide precision data in order to make a decision whether to move forward with a certain product or not. In these cases, I like to keep that data private between AgRevival and the company paying for the research. I don’t like to see the data from these trials make it out into the marketplace. As we’ve previously discussed, that’s really decision-making data intended to help a company decide which product to take to market. 

The second category is public studies. At some level there’s some benchmarking going on. For example, we might be looking at four different forms of nitrogen. This research is company-sponsored as well; we look for partners to help finance these trials, where we would include a product that they sell in the mix. For example, we have tested different forms and rates of nitrogen against each other. The objective of a trial like this is to provide an unbiased decision-making tool for the farmer. The companies that partner with us find value in providing information to farmers to make good decisions. 

So those are the two buckets I’d use to separate company-sponsored research: the private studies where companies need data to make a product decision, and the public studies where companies say ‘we’re providing funding for this research to help you make a decision on your farm’.

What About 'Bad' Numbers?

A good research company will help advise trial participants on the best category for their products. Should product A remain in a private trial or is it ready to go head-to-head with competing products and practices? After all, the data is the data. If the study data makes your company look bad because your product gave every treatment a negative ROI, it’s going to end up that way in our research book, which is printed and also published online. Farmers are going to see it. 

Read More: View AgRevival’s Research Books

Our yearly research book is my way of being very intentional with companies that want to do research with us. Do you want this data to be private for your own use from the outset, or is this something you want published and available to farmers for decision making purposes? 

Right now, there are probably three independent research companies per corn producing state. So, three primary companies in Iowa, three in Illinois, three in Wisconsin, and three in Minnesota. All of us have different services and many don’t put themselves out there on a public basis like we do at AgRevival. Many are involved exclusively with very specific contract research; they supply observations and data and the companies can do what they want with those. And you also have the universities running studies like this as well. Again, what we try to do here at AgRevival is be very upfront with companies when they’re investigating a potential research project with us.

Capturing the Bigger Picture: On-Farm Trials 

This brings me back around to something we touched on before, which would be on-farm trials. I always tell farmers—if you’re going to try something on your farm, give it a fair trial. Just don’t throw something into the mix and forget it. You have to be intentional if you want to get good data out of the trial. 

A good on-farm trial starts with the farmer buying the product for forty, eighty, or one hundred and twenty acres so that they’re invested in it. You have to ask the right questions: How does this fit into my current program? Or, how will this new product make my current program better so I see a desired result? These trials play an important role in learning about specific products or practices. 

A prime example is nitrogen, which is a hot topic right now. Specifically, farmers are looking at ways to reduce nitrogen without reducing the ROI they’ve been experiencing. You’ve got the cost issue and the environmental issues, with governments starting to say ‘hey, you have to reduce your nitrogen’. So, farmers are wondering how they can give up a little nitrogen without decreasing their yields. And so you have products out there touting things like ‘you can cut forty pounds of nitrogen if you apply our product, and you won’t see a yield decrease . . . or you’ll even see a yield increase’. 

Maybe a company did see a result such as this on a small-scale trial. Once that product hits farm trials, you might find out that it works really well in one particular environment or in tandem with another product or practice. Maybe it only performs on no-till acres or with irrigation. That’s why it’s important to be really intentional with on-farm trials and ensure that they’re conducted with attention to detail. 

Partnering with Farmers for Insightful Research

We have a really good pool of farmers that we work with. We know that if we ask them to do a forty-acre trial, they’re going to conduct it in a way that is going to provide a helpful dataset. The study has to be done with GPS. It has to be marked and appear on the monitor correctly. “I think I applied it over there” doesn’t work well when you’re trying to provide data back to companies on their products’ performance on the farm. 

So we’ve invested a lot of time and effort into making sure the on-farm trials we’re involved with are conducted with the correct protocols. We’re lucky in that we’ve been able to lean on a group of farmers that we can always count on to do things the right way. We help with the data collection, so it’s not all on the farmer. We take the monitor information, the observations, and run those over soil type maps and things like that. You can get a pretty clear idea of whether you’re looking at a four-bushel or ten-bushel improvement. 

Valuable Advice

I’ve said this before, I want us to provide data and observations that tell a story about a particular product or practice that will help farmers make informed decisions for their own farms. And yes, you’re going to see claims out there everywhere—do this or do that and you’ll bring in more bushels. It’s how almost everything is sold to farmers. But the reality is, there are products out there that will bring improvements to your operation. That’s why we’re proud to publish our research yearly; to put the data in farmers’ hands, along with our observations, to help them choose the best strategy for their operations.