Abstract
Practical Farmers of Iowa (PFI) is an organization that seeks to provide interactive methods of relaying information through farmer-to-farmer sharing (farm field days, workshop discussions, networking) and the generation of new information. On-farm research (OFR) is an important information-generating activity of this group. PFI has shown that key to doing research on farms lies in combining practical protocols with the statistician's old familiar friends - replication and randomization.
We provide background on PFI and how PFI cooperators carne to using strip plots and paired comparisons to answer fundamental questions about what to do on their individual farms. We discuss the challenges faced by OFR cooperators, how those challenges are met and how the simple paired comparison t-test works for the OFR cooperator to answer that very typical experimental question posed by producers: "Is alternative practice 'b' better than, worse than, or no different from my current practice 'a'?"
Keywords
sustainable farming, on-farm research, t-test
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Exner, Derrick N.; Kendall, Jennifer; and Thompson, Dick
(1998).
"ON-FARM RESEARCH IN A DECENTRALIZED INFORMATION MODEL OR GRASSROOTS STATISTICS,"
Conference on Applied Statistics in Agriculture.
https://doi.org/10.4148/2475-7772.1284
ON-FARM RESEARCH IN A DECENTRALIZED INFORMATION MODEL OR GRASSROOTS STATISTICS
Practical Farmers of Iowa (PFI) is an organization that seeks to provide interactive methods of relaying information through farmer-to-farmer sharing (farm field days, workshop discussions, networking) and the generation of new information. On-farm research (OFR) is an important information-generating activity of this group. PFI has shown that key to doing research on farms lies in combining practical protocols with the statistician's old familiar friends - replication and randomization.
We provide background on PFI and how PFI cooperators carne to using strip plots and paired comparisons to answer fundamental questions about what to do on their individual farms. We discuss the challenges faced by OFR cooperators, how those challenges are met and how the simple paired comparison t-test works for the OFR cooperator to answer that very typical experimental question posed by producers: "Is alternative practice 'b' better than, worse than, or no different from my current practice 'a'?"
