PR - Whole Profitability Impact From Implementing And Harvesting Trials With Precision Agriculture Technologies

Introduction 1st para. - For a combination of reasons, farmers are motivated to conduct their own on-farm trials; however, onfarm trials are not costless. Farmers often cite reasons for not conducting on-farm trials including: 1) interference with other farming operations, 2) potential yield reduction by inferior inputs or non-optimal rates (too high or too low rates), 3) increased direct costs from over application of inputs and 4) increased probability of bad decision making from implementing experiment results on large acreage in the following year. This study addresses the first point that implementing and harvesting on-farm trials interferes with other farming operations by quantifying the yield penalties from delayed field operations on a representative U.S. Cornbelt farm.