Doing your own strip trials can yield positive returns

Sunday, June 7, 2015

The risk in setting up your own test strips is low and the potential rewards can be quite high

by DALE COWAN

On-farm strip trials can be very insightful when it comes to verifying product performances, cropping concepts or services on your farm. ROI or "return on investment" is usually expressed as a percentage. It is determined by taking the difference in additional economic value gained by a practice, minus the cost of the practice and divided by the cost of the practice, times one hundred.

Strip trials can run the full length of the farm. The key aspect is to repeat the treatment strips three to four times across the field and leave untreated checks in between.

As crop commodity values decline, the tendency is to cut cost to maintain incomes. However, if decisions are based solely on commodity prices, you may be leaving money on the table. It is not the cost of treatment that matters but whether or not it brings value to your operation.

Using strip trials is one way to assess whether changes in practices will be a paying proposition. As an example, micronutrients may be considered an optional or extra expense when, in fact, their use maybe justified even when commodity prices are lower.  

The micronutrient Boron (B) on corn is one of the practices that appears in most (though not all) locations to offer increased yields in corn. Does it pay? The table on page 30 is a Boron trial in a liquid starter at two sites over two years.

The starter placed Boron in a two inch x two inch band with the planter added $7.37 an acre to production costs. Over two years, it returned on average an additional $26.37 per acre of net profit with an ROI of 359 per cent. Most notably, the break-even yield increase required to cover the additional cost at $4.50 corn is only 1.6 bushels per acre.

This trial produced 7.5 bushels of additional yield. Higher commodity prices would serve to increase the net returns. Even with corn at $4.50, the returns are very positive.  (A word of caution: I would strongly recommend not to apply B directly on the seed.)

There are no guarantees that everything will work. However, taking the time to set up the plots properly is important. Here are some tips for your trial:

– Choose one thing to test.
– Replicate three or four times. This helps to mitigate field variability and increases the validity of the results.
– Leave check strips of no treatment for comparison.
– Record the location.
– Record observations all season long.
– Capture yield data.
– Evaluate the response.
– Do an ROI.

Performing your own on-farm strip trials on things that interest you will add to the collective knowledge base. The risk is low in test strips and the potential rewards can be quite high. As you learn, continue to expand the treated acres. When trials do not work out according to plan, there is always something to be learned and more questions to be asked. Either way, you are still learning new things.

Remember, the most important treatment is the zero rate treatment. You will need that to calculate your own ROI. BF

Dale Cowan is a Certified Crop Adviser in Ontario and the Senior Agronomist and Sales Manager for AGRIS and Wanstead Co-operatives, located in southwestern Ontario.