NISKU, Alta. – The most important step when planning on-farm plots and research is to partner up, says William Punko.
Speaking at the Alberta Reduced Tillage Linkages Direct Seeding Advantage Conference in Nisku, Punko provided personal perspectives based on research plots he has been involved with over the years.
Punko, who farms near Westlock, Alta., said working with other producers is a big part of conducting field trials.
“I’ve partnered up with our local research group, Gateway Research out of Westlock. Throughout Alberta, there’s all kinds of groups you can work with,” he said.
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“They can help with doing stats calculations, once you get a lot of data. What does it mean and is there a difference between plot A and plot B?
“A lot of times they’ll have summer students that will help with labour if you’re doing plant counts. A lot of them have small equipment that you can use for plot maintenance, like mowing edges so you don’t have weed issues. They may have small sprayers if you want to add a little trial across one end, for interest sake or demonstrations.”
Punko said it’s important to have clear objectives and design the project with them in mind.
“Do you want to compare inputs, different fertilizer blends, fertilizer rates, some of the slow release fertilizers that are on the market? Or is it some new chemicals or fungicides?” he said.
“You may be comparing a new style of seeding tool, with all the independent openers on the market right now. You may wonder, ‘are they going to give me a big enough advantage to accomplish what I want, or do I want to stay away from them because there’s other drawbacks I didn’t foresee on them?’ “
Punko urged producers not to get carried away when designing a project. Multiple replicates or adding an extra chemical trial are common problems, he added.
“All of a sudden, your five little plots have turned into 50,” he said.
“You’ve got to keep it simple the first time out because you have to harvest this stuff. You don’t want to go out and say, what did I get myself into?’ “
Make sure the project has a control plot or standard check.
“(Don’t) have the rest of your field seeded to one canola variety and have five different varieties in your plots. You may have a winner in the plot, but did it actually yield any better than the rest of the field?” he said.
“I’ve found, if you don’t put your variety into the plot, you can harvest all your plots, then go, ‘hmm, how did the rest of the field perform?’ I have a field average number, but how would it have compared to the plot? What looked good in the plots may have not turned out any better than the rest of the field.”
Topography and soil variability are important when selecting sites. Level land and uniform soil would be ideal, Punko said, to help achieve consistent results.
“In my case, I don’t have that. I have to deal with topography and soil variability. What I try to do is keep it consistent in the plot. I don’t put part of my plot on a hillside and the rest in a low spot. If there’s a sand ridge running across it, I try to position the plot so the sand ridge is roughly equal through all the plots.”
Punko likes half mile long plots because they provide consistent data.
Field history is also important. When picking one site, Punko used aerial photos to compare growth characteristics across his field.
“We had an old fence line of trees, and an old post office in another part of the field. Things like old yard sites, old gas wells or corrals – you have to be conscious of. An old barnyard can really screw up your plots,” he said.
“So I wouldn’t recommend, if you have a new piece of property, to do trials on it, until you’ve seen what the growth characteristics are.”
Punko said he knows of a farmer who had a diagonal strip that ran across one field. Investigations revealed an old fence line that had been cleaned up using a high rate of Tordon.
“Until you’ve eliminated a lot of that, it can mess up data for you.”
Easy access is another consideration for plot maintenance and plant counts.
Punko said when the site is selected and it’s time to design the plots, it’s also time to lean on a producer’s partners again.
“They’ve got experience and ideas, they can help you set up your plot designs. For a lot of first timers, a single strip is where you want to start. If you start doing multiple reps, it can be a lot of work. But usually it’s not that bad once you’ve gone through the experience a couple of times,” he said.
“If you’re looking at buying a new drill for your farm and want to check field finish, you do a lot of silage. For that, a single rep will probably work out. If you’re doing fungicide trials, chemical or variety trials, you may want to look at multiplying the reps to get more consistent data.”
With crops such as canola, which will be swathed before the data is harvested, it’s a good idea to make sure the plots can accommodate that.
“You may always seed a field north and south, so you seed your canola strips that way. Come harvest, you realize you normally swath east and west. Now, you have to cut your plots north and south and hope the wind doesn’t get them, or call it a writeoff and try again next year,” said Punko.
“And you need enough space for your plots. If you’ve got a 120 foot sprayer and you’re doing a few chemical trials, you can eat up a lot of field in a hurry. Even with a simple two reps and eight canola varieties, that 60 foot drill will move you down the field in a big hurry. Will topography or water ponding bite me?”
Matching equipment can be a challenge. A plot seeded with a 60 foot drill is tough to cut with a 36 foot header.
When it’s time to lay out the plots, Punko said the old school method involves a tape measure and pin flags down the field.
“The new school uses autosteer and GPS. I have a 39 foot drill, so when I did the plots I told them it was 41 feet. You wind up with a strip running down on each side of the plots. Then we harvested on a single strip using a yield monitor,” he said.
“Even though we use a GPS, we still put in a few stakes and signs. It’s too easy to mess up later on in the year, and you can’t remember what treatment was what.”
Another thing to be conscious of is non-plot operations. If plots are sprayed the same direction as seeded, there may be one or two wheel tracks in one plot and none in the next.
“If you’re coming down the middle of that plot with your combine and you’re picking up the majority of the tracked area, it may affect your data. So if you’re spraying, try to run across the plots instead of in the same direction.”
Producers should decide the order of treatments ahead of time to minimize confusion and delays at seeding and harvest.
In a 12 acre 2007 pea trial, with four treatments and three replicates of each, Punko used his autosteer and GPS to go up, back and up, in different locations, with each treatment.
“If we were doing it with markers and pin flags, it would have been a lot of extra work. I suspect the plot may have taken me an extra two hours through the whole year because it was well thought out and designed. Two hours for seeding, spraying and harvest really doesn’t account for much,” he said.
Punko said producers should determine what information they want to collect: yield; grade; maturity; lodging, visual differences though the year; nodule assessment in pulse crops on weather data recording.
Data analysis and evaluation is important because things aren’t always as they seem.
In one of his plots this year, Punko’s yield monitor recorded 65 bushels per acre on plot A and 61 bu. per acre on plot B. It seemed straightforward until he looked at the weights: 2,940 pounds on plot A and 3,004 lb. on plot B.
On the yield map, Punko noticed a long tail on the end of plot B.
“We hadn’t lifted our header quite high enough when running over to the truck. My area counter shows 0.74 acres and 0.81 acres. So you’ve got to be careful what you see. You can get tricked.”
William Punko’s guide to successful on-farm research:
– Partner up
– Decide what you need to know so you can adopt it on your farm
– Treatment and check selection
– Site selection
– Partner up
– Design and plot layout
– Record keeping and data collection
– Partner up
– Data evaluation, analysis and interpretation
– Partner up
