Will Fulwider 0:00
Are we good? Yep, okay, yes, all right.

Welcome to Field Notes. Today, we are talking all about on farm trials and research. What makes a good research question? What options do farmers have for project design, and how do they navigate the logistics of data collection analysis? Keep listening, and we’ll try and answer some of those questions. But before we do that, Michael, as per usual, has a little lead off. It’s turned into a fun facts as of late, I think he’s ditched the jokes that came off maybe a little bit too stale. So what’s your fun fact for today, Michael?

Michael Geissinger 0:43
Well, I don’t think it’s stale jokes. I think it’s like the Sahara Desert over here when it comes to jokes right now, it’s just very dry. I do have a fun fact here for us.

Will Fulwider 0:54
Or no life, you know the Sahara Desert, no life there too.

Michael Geissinger 0:57
Yeah, you know maybe that. But so my fun fact today is, Wisconsin currently has 38 active nitrogen optimization pilot projects, so lots of on farm research happening, and that’s made possible by funding from DATCP and the legislature made available starting in 2022 and so I’ll let you set up who our guests are.

Will Fulwider 1:19
Alright, well, today we’ve got Monica Schauer, who’s the research director for that program, the nope, no op Wisconsin nitrogen optimization pilot projects with UW Madison Soil and Environmental Sciences Department getting that right this time, and Ben Turzinski, who’s the farm manager of Ben Turzinski Farms in Almond Wisconsin. Thanks for coming on and chatting us with us today. Monica, you want to tell us a little bit more about your program first off?

Monica Schauer 1:19
Absolutely thank you for having me on to talk about the program. It’s always something I’m excited to do. So as Michael said, it’s the nitrogen optimization pilot program, and it’s funded by DATCP our Department of Ag and Trade Consumer Protection, and this money is coming from the state to go towards farmer led on Farm Research. But what makes this program a little different than other research that that’s maybe been done or other demonstration plots is that this these projects are replicated and randomized and through the program, participants partner with UW to make sure that that research has statistical vigor and that the data we’re seeing we can really trust. So that’s kind of the interesting thing about this program. They’re a little more vigorous, but that’s also why there’s the money that goes towards it. So these grants could be up to $40,000 per producer, so multiple producers could come together on a project and increase that budget, and it’s just a it’s a good way to give some incentive to doing this research, because it is, it is a lot of work, as we’ll get into, but it’s also very valuable. And the program is relatively new. This is my second year in the position, and it the first awards were granted in March of 2022

Will Fulwider 3:06
All righty, Ben who are you?

Ben Turzinski 3:08
Well, my name is Ben Turzinski. I’m Manager here at Ben Turzinski Farms, third generation, myself, working on the fourth with my kids. We’ve been a grain and vegetable farm here in central Wisconsin since the 40s. Um, was approached by uh, Ken Schroeder and Monica and several at the UW to take on a project like this and in our sands, it’s pretty important to monitor our nitrogen applications as far as leaching and groundwater, and I was always interested in trying some of these different rates and seeing what they would do, and having this project available through DATCP made that more feasible to try

Michael Geissinger 4:01
Awesome. Thanks. Ben. So I think we’re going to dive right in here by talking about some of the more technical details of what a research project looks like. And so I’m going to punt this one to Monica to start out with. But Monica one of the things I noticed when I’m talking with lots of farmers is they want to study everything, and so what makes a good research question, and should we be addressing, just like, one thing at a time, or multiple things at a time, and then maybe second, if you want to follow up on that a little bit, how does that inform, sort of the data analysis process, too?

Monica Schauer 4:39
Yeah, absolutely. And that’s something I get a lot too. You know, we start by asking, what questions do you have about nitrogen on your farm? And, you know, sometimes the answer is, what questions don’t I have? Right? Nitrogen is a really, it’s a really tricky nutrient to measure. It’s, it’s high in demand for a lot of crops, and we have a lot of questions on it, which is why we’re still studying it, and why it’s and why this money is going towards studying it. So it’s definitely it’s definitely possible to answer multiple questions with one trial or experiment, but you need to be kind of thoughtful about what you want, what questions you want to ask, and what you’re feasibly going to be able to answer. A piece of advice that I usually give is keep it simple with trial design. The baseline of all of these nopp projects are a nitrogen rate study. So that is putting out different rates of nitrogen on your crop from zero to something kind of above what you’d expect the crop demand to be in, you know, increments of 50 pounds or 75 pounds, or whatever works for you. And then by having those different rates out, you’re able to see, how did the crop respond to that nitrogen rate? What was the yield at that rate? And in most cases, that yield will respond in a curve. And we’re able to see, okay, our yield increased as nitrogen rate increased until a certain point. And knowing what that point is is really the key of nitrogen research. What is that point where we need to meet that maximum yield, and also, when we apply economics to it, what is that point where I’m not getting any more return on my investment? And that’s really the key, that’s the key question on a lot of these trials, and that’s something we’re able to answer. But with that, this program also requires some soil sampling. So we require testing the inorganic soil nitrogen in your soil, specifically soil nitrate, which is the form of nitrogen that’s available to the plant that it’s able to take up. And that kind of pairs well with our university recommendations. So from just doing that nitrogen right trial, you’re able to see, okay, was my nitrogen rate? Did I reach that, that maximum yield, where I expected it to? Did my soil nitrogen reflect that? You know, does that match up? So that’s kind of the cool thing about these projects, because once you figure out what your optimal nitrogen rate is, then you’re able to answer other questions based on other data that you’ve gathered that didn’t necessarily increase the size of your trial or or the work that you’re doing, you know, on the yield monitor and parsing out plots and everything. Just from collecting data, we’re able to kind of pair that together with that yield response curve. So we can see, you know, did, did are my higher soil, organic field, soil organic matter field, did that kind of pair with a higher yield when I moved, when I moved the plot, from year to year? So that’s even with the simple design, you’re able to answer a lot of questions, and then a lot of folks have more specific questions, what? How does my nitrogen rate differ? What are my nitrogen need differ under different management practices? So maybe with and without a cover crop, or with and without manure, and folks are able to set up trials that does essentially double the size of your trial but you’re able to answer that additional management question,

Michael Geissinger 7:44
Yeah, for sure. Thanks for that overview, Monica. I want to flip it over to Ben here for a second too. So Ben, in your experience doing On Farm Research, how has either the simplicity or complexity of of project or trial design sort of influence the need for, for on farm resources and time.

Ben Turzinski 8:05
Well, the biggest struggle with us in the central sands here is we’re all use center pivot irrigation, and being able to try to design plot that will work with the, you know, a circle versus a square versus, you know, you don’t have a lot of square edges for measuring things and but being they’re willing to work with me on the one last year’s plot where I had to have it on a curve, because that’s just where it fit and it, you know, then you’re kind of skewing some of the numbers with, you know, distances and stuff, it worked out. But that, along that line, is where I would say is gotta watch for the way the plot is designed.

Will Fulwider 8:54
Yeah. And Ben, can you talk a little bit more about specifically with your nopp, what it exactly is that you all are testing?

Ben Turzinski 9:02
Yes, I we with the nopp, we made sure we had the same seed variety. I use the same planter. I planted all the same date. The only thing we are changing is the rate of nitrogen on our farm. I’m fully capable of doing variable rate pretty much everything. We run GPS and all of our tractors, and I have full mapping software. I know we’re going to kind of cover that in our next nuts and bolts, but I don’t know if that answered your question, but

Will Fulwider 9:38
No, that’s great. And I think I want to zoom out for a second. You know, we’re talking about the nopp, which is great, which is a lot of where the funding is for some of this on Farm Research. But you don’t need to be a part of this one project to do on Farm Research. So I kind of want to kick it back to Monica for a second yo talk about All right, so what we’re thinking about questions that work. In relation to no PP, but also like, how do we go about designing something that answers the question, you know, how, how kind of rigorous does the design need to be to answer that question, what types of different design are there even and, you know, and then Ben, I can kick it back to you and think about, like, what works for you as a farmer?

Monica Schauer 10:19
Yeah. So I think generally with these nitrogen rate trials four replications is good. So you have all of your nitrogen rates, and then those need to be like in a strip across the field in four different places. And the way that we set it up, and that works really well for statistics, is we use blocking. So it’s called a randomized complete block design, which just kind of the high level of it is that you have your different nitrogen rates, or if it isn’t a nitrogen rate, trial, your different treatments. And if you split your field up into quarters, each of those treatments would occur one time in each of those quarters, so say, your highest nitrogen rate, it would be one time. And, you know, the north, south, east and west quarter your field. So that’s kind of a way that we can get rid of any field variation, or not get rid of it, but we can account for any field variation. So we know farm fields are variable in some areas of the state more than others. So we want to know if we’re seeing differences between our treatments, between our nitrogen rates. Are we seeing those across the field? And my job is using statistical models to see if those differences that we’re seeing are actually true. So we have data points from each kind of treatment from different points of the field, and I can feed those into a statistical model, and then we can see, okay, we saw differences on the the yield monitor as we’re harvesting. Are those differences actually true, or is it just due to field variation. So that’s kind of the cool thing about pairing these field trials with UW and with statistics that we’re able to actually parse out those differences.

Will Fulwider 11:51
And can you talk a little bit about what other types of design could be used, maybe not even just with nopp, but for on farm research in general?

Monica Schauer 12:01
Yes, absolutely. So a split plot design is another kind of example, like what I what I just described, with your different treatments in the four quarters of the field, if you want to add another layer to it, that’s what we call a split plot design. So then maybe on half of each of those quarters you would have a cover crop, or you would have, as Ben used some a type of biological product that might might enhance nitrogen uptake from the plant, or maybe manure, so you’re able to add that additional management factor, and you’re still getting all your components in the different field areas. But another way of doing it at a larger scale, maybe, if you’re not doing a nitrogen rate trial, if you’re just trying, maybe with and without a specific seed treatment, or you want to test, you know, micro micronutrient at plant or something, you can just do strict trials across the field. So each pass as you’re planting, you would maybe, let’s say that you’re doing a seed treatment. So you you’ve got one type of seed that’s treated, you’re going across your field, and you could, you know, split a pass and plant half your field and then go back and and fill in those gaps with the untreated seed, and then you’ve kind of had those strips across the field. So that’s, that’s another way of doing it. So they’re full field length strips and replicated kind of across your field as many times as can fit.

Will Fulwider 13:18
Cool. So Ben, I’m thinking about what this looks like on your on your pivots, and it definitely looks definitely looks different than the fields I deal with in Dane and Dodge County, because I’m thinking everything’s on a curve, and it looks kind of psychedelic, in a way. So I’m wondering, like, how did, what did this look like on your fields? Monica mentioned briefly, kind of what you were testing a little bit with that biological product. And then, so how did you put this in, you know, what did it look like?

Ben Turzinski 13:43
I’m fortunate, like I said, that we have GPS on our tractor so I can go out and and Ken would come out in the spring. And this year, we happened to flip split the plot, as Monica mentioned, we had, one half had a biology, biological that we’re going to apply, and the other half was without and Ken was able to come out and put flags, and I was able to use my GPS with my Ag Leader system, and mark the passes. And using a, a B line, I could skip passes, you know. And basically what I would do is, is go out and he would flag it. And this year we had it split right down the center of the field, so there was a lot of short rows and kind of mismanaged, if you want to say rows on the outside of it. But luckily, with my GPS and stuff. You know, when it came to spraying it, the sprayer just went on one track and he just ran some over for the sake of having the the plot in a good spot in the field. But it, if we split it right down the middle there, and it, it mostly comes down to just taking the time. Time to mark it out and in the spring is the most important time to do it right, because, you know, he only do it once.

Michael Geissinger 15:09
So Ben, when you’re when you’re thinking about these on farm research projects that you’ve kind of done, you have some experience doing them. What in your mind, like, makes a really good on Farm Research Project versus an on farm research project that has maybe flopped for you, or maybe you’ve seen it flop for someone else.

Ben Turzinski 15:31
I doing it the way we have, works really well for me. On my end the farmer end is that time of year can be pretty stressful for us, wanting to get everything in timely and things like that, and having Ken or Monica or them able to just kind of put it together for us, and I’m able to just kind of follow the plan that that that makes it a lot easier.

Michael Geissinger 16:00
Cool, yeah. And when you’ve received data back from from these kinds of projects, are you, are you able to make sense of it? Or how have you relied on other people that maybe can help with like interpreting the data or analyzing it with statistics and things like that?

Ben Turzinski 16:16
Yeah, it, I could understand it for the most part. And some of it isn’t necessarily a surprise, you know, I think you ask every farmer out there, they’re going to know their field as good as anyone. And, you know, places in the field that I expected to struggle struggled, you know, and this kind of research made it to where we could see that it, you know, it wasn’t struggling just because of the nitrogen, you know, that’s just a poor spot in the field. And seeing that data wrapped up, and now that we’ve got two years worth of data to kind of, you know, compare to see what it actually does, we’ll see where it goes from there. Um, you know, I plan on, possibly, I’m not going to go and change my practices for the whole farm, per se, but I might take a whole half of pivot or something and try changing how I do stuff to see how it works, using the data we’ve come up with the last few years.

Will Fulwider 17:21
And Ben, you mentioned, you know, that it’s a big help to have people like Ken and Monica around, you know, put stuff together while you’re trying to be like, I need to plan all this stuff for, you know, for this year, it gets way too rainy to even get in the field, although in the sands, you have less of an issue than we do in Dodge or Dane counties. But I’m wondering, from your perspective, how much labor and time is this? You know, if you’ve got, you know, I worked with some farmers, and we had 40 plots. And, you know, maybe you didn’t have quite as many of that, maybe you did. And so from your perspective, you know, how much time and labor is it? Is it a big lift? And is it worth it?

Ben Turzinski 18:00
Yeah, I would say it’s worth it. Um, luckily for us, in this project, we were only changing one variable. Um, so that made it somewhat easier. I didn’t have to make a lot. I didn’t have to change seed. I didn’t have to change products, you know, I just had my my system allows me just with a few button presses to, you know, put less of my starter product product down, or my side dress product down, as far as the time it takes. The first year we did it, I didn’t take as enough time to label some of the stuff correctly with the planter. And then that makes it a little more difficult to follow where you’re at in the plot throughout the year. This year, I took the time to label each strip with its own name, so then when I came back, either in the fall or side dressing, it was all predetermined, and the system was able to pick up where it was at in the field, and it knew which plot it was in. So that took a lot of time out of it. It just It took a lot of time up front for me, more in the spring to get it set than any other time. On our farm. We’re pretty fortunate to have the technology to be able to, I’m fully capable to variable rate seed and fertilizer and everything with my planter, and even with our applicators and spraying equipment at the same time. And you I can plant my planter. I like to tell people that my planter isn’t a 16 row planter, it’s 16 one row planters. And I can variable rate the seeds, I can variable rate the nitrogen. We’re very fortunate to be able to do that stuff, and that’s where taking on a project like this, I don’t necessarily look at my field farm as one field by field basis. I look at it with this technology. We’re able to even go. You know, foot by foot in the field, almost instead of acre by acre. Even with, with the way I can draw maps on here and it the system knows where I am, and with the data we’ve learned from these on farm projects, I can, I can learn, you know, which soil and which spot in the field, can take the extra nutrients and what can’t you know, to not only save on my bottom line, but help eliminate some of the, you know, runoff and contaminant and stuff like that.

Will Fulwider 20:29
That’s amazing. What this tech can do from a from a research perspective, and how much kind of easier it is, in a sense, to be able to collect that data when you’re able to not have to get off the tractor and change, change the chains, or whatever it is to change the rates, etc, just, it just makes it so you can just go be bop. And it does it to some extent, right?

Ben Turzinski 20:51
It definitely does. I mean, I’m not going to say there’s no cost to it, right? This stuff has a cost, but it also has, you know, a life expectancy. And you know, you we, we spent $30,000 on our planter three years ago to put all electric drives on it and all of that type of stuff to make it my 16 one row planters and but that, over the lifespan of that machine, I hope it’ll save, yeah, more than that,

Will Fulwider 21:21
Absolutely, and so Monica, I kind of want to hear from your perspective, for folks that you know aren’t fortunate enough to have that type of technology like Ben’s got, how can they approach on Farm Research?

Monica Schauer 21:34
Yeah, and I think it’s a little more time intensive if you can’t have everything automated you know, think about what you’re doing and put in your put in your prescription rates, and just get your cab and go. I think some folks have been really creative in how they’re varying those N rates, or any any research that they’d be doing on their farms with money from this program. Some, a specific farmer has kind of created his own like custom Y drop nitrogen applicator, so he’s able to get skinnier strips, and then he got good how fast do I need to go to get out these rates on these strips? And that’s just kind of an example of innovation that’s that’s come about from this grant and other farms there. They know, okay, I need to do two passes at this speed to get this rate, to pass at this speed, to get this right. And they didn’t have to change their equipment or anything, but they anything, but they just created their nitrogen rates in the trial according to what they what they were able to do, as far as how much they were able to vary in a pass. So it is, it is approachable, definitely, for folks who don’t have that, that higher tech equipment, that they can just manage everything from the cab. But it definitely, definitely is still, is still doable. It just takes a little more creativity.

Will Fulwider 22:44
Yeah, I mean, I even had farmers that I was doing some of these nitrogen rate trials that didn’t have yield monitors on their equipment and really didn’t have access to scales, what have you. So we went out and hand sampled, and, you know, it’s more labor, but that’s kind of why extension is there, in part to help out with these. And with some of the more tech forward farmers, they’re able to do it and send over the yield maps, and I can pull it out on the computer. It’s pretty slick. And then other ones, I’m getting slapped in the face by corn dried down corn leaves as I’m trying to pick corn. So, you know, there’s all different approaches to it, and and, you know, there’s, there’s ways to figure it out. So it is still, you know, rigorous research, even though it’s, you know, maybe not as high tech.

Monica Schauer 23:27
Yep, definitely. And I think there’s, there’s been a lot of cool relationships that have come up from research to, like, figuring out who in the area’s got a way wagon that they can use, or what co ops can they, can they work with to get that, to get that harvest on

Will Fulwider 23:41
Cool. I think we can end it there unless Ben you had something to add.

Ben Turzinski 23:44
No, I mean, I mean, I don’t care if you want to record everything, you guys can just cut out what you don’t want. So just let it record in case I say something good again. Then I don’t have to try to remember it and sound silly the second time.

Will Fulwider 23:56
No, you sounded great the second time.

Ben Turzinski 23:58
But, you know, our our farm is kind of right in that my dad and I have discussed it ourselves. We’re kind of in that middle zone where we’re a big enough farm to where we can justify purchasing some of this equipment, but we’re not so big that we can go over the top with it. You know, I we’re about 1200 acres of farmland total. And you know, it would split amongst four or five different crops. And you know this, this equipment, like I said, was 30 grand redo, the planter, well, and then you’re running it over 1200 acres a year, you can justify some of it. And you get to some of these bigger farms where doing some projects like this, they might not have the time, you know, we’re fortunate to be right in the middle. And then you get to the smaller farms, like Monica mentioned, you know, you you learn your who has what equipment, and they share stuff, you know, and it, having the technology is nice, but does a pencil all the time, you know? The. But like and it helps us make more than than just one or two decisions a year, you know, keeping track of varieties and all that stuff.

Will Fulwider 25:06
Yeah, absolutely, yeah, doable on all scales, yes, and budgets.

Michael Geissinger 25:14
Thanks, Ben, yeah. It’s really insightful to kind of hear what you guys are working with on farm to make these projects happen. Because I know it does take quite a bit. I want to direct this next question back to Monica to jump into this sort of data and analysis piece a little bit more. So Monica, it’s, it’s not uncommon to hear from people, whether it’s farmers or not, or anybody studying something that you know, a farming example is, well, I applied it on the whole field, and I got higher yields this year than I got last year. Or I applied it on the whole field and or did half and half and just compared, like a side by side comparison. So how important is, like the the statistical analysis for these kinds of projects and and what is statistics telling us that some of these more simpler designs might not be able to

Monica Schauer 26:09
Yeah, absolutely. And I hear that. I hear that a lot, and I think the most important piece of statistics and trial design that we need to include, and that is really, it’s a necessity in this program, especially, is that we have some sort of control. Because I think a lot you hear, Oh, I applied, yeah, this, this across my whole field, or, you know, I did a control strip in the middle of my field, so maybe you tried a lower nitrogen rate across your whole field, and then one controls, or one strip where you just did your regular program and you didn’t see a yield difference. Okay, well, maybe that one strip is where some manure went on heavy a few years ago. Or maybe that was in a higher level of organic matter, you know, in a low spot of the field. So that’s the really important thing about this replicated research. It makes your projects larger. It makes them, you know, you have to slow down in spring when you’re planting or putting out nitrogen or putting out your product, you have to slow down, but it’s important to get that that replication with those controls. So then you can say, Okay, we applied a biological here. We didn’t hear and that’s occurring in all these different parts of the field. And then, like I said, with the statistical models, we’re able to determine if any effects we see are true or not, and that’s really, that’s really the biggest difference between this more rigorous, replicated, randomized on Farm Research. And when I say randomization, I mean whatever treatments you have, they’re occurring in a different order across the field. So your lowest N rate isn’t always next to your highest N rate that it’s mixed up, so then we don’t get any, you know, any effects of of nitrogen that might move, or anything else that would happen across those plots. So that’s kind of the, those are kind of the the backbones of these statistically rigorous trial designs, I would say, replication, randomization and controls.

Michael Geissinger 27:58
Awesome. And thank you, Monica, for doing pretty much all of that work. What I understand on that opp side, that’s–

Monica Schauer 28:05
–that’s the easy stuff–

Michael Geissinger 28:07
–No easy task though, either. I’ve just started learning a little bit more about statistics recently, and one of the data sets that I’ve worked on more recently, we have talked about it sort of as like a post mortem data set. I don’t know if you’ve heard it called that before, where you get really excited about a project and you go and collect all this data, but you really don’t have a research question you’re trying to answer with the trial design and something you’re trying to, like, make sense of it and develop the question after the fact. And so I think it’s really great that we’re having this conversation about, like, well, let’s formulate that question first, sort of build the trial design based on that and based on, like, what, how the farmer wants to approach it, and then work, work through the analysis from there. So I know we have Monica for nopp, but are either of you guys aware of, like, other resources that you’ve you’ve used for data analysis in the past, or anything like that that might be available to farms interested in trying this on Farm Research.

Ben Turzinski 29:08
You can go first, Monica,

Monica Schauer 29:10
Yeah. Um, so yeah for nopp, that’s kind of the cool part. You do this, this trial, and then you get kind of connected with with UW in that way, and that you get that, you get that statistical work done for you. Other than that, we do have a new on farm research program starting up at UW, and we have Abby Augarten on board as the program lead on that. So she is someone that will kind of help with thinking about on Farm Research outside of nopp. You know, maybe not quite to the vigor of nopp, but thinking about things from a scientific standpoint and getting answers. So we that program is starting up, and I’m really excited to see what that does as a as a resource for farmers. But other than that, I think just the, you know, the other person at UW, like, like Will and Michael the um. Um, regional educators and with more specific questions. There’s the ag and water quality program that also has regional folks around the state that can help answer those types of questions.

Ben Turzinski 30:11
Yeah, my my experience with figuring out some of the data is through some of our farmer farmer led watershed groups and groups like that. And having UW agents such as Ken Schroeder at the at the meetings, he always brings his table of brochures and data for us to to look at, you know, and he usually gives a talk for about 10 minutes. And you know that those types of things are the ways that I see the data for the most part.

Will Fulwider 30:41
Great. Well, really appreciate both of your perspectives on on Farm Research. It’s helpful, hopefully, for folks to be able to kind of cobble together some of their thoughts and put it down on their fields in a way that is hopefully able to glean some type of analysis, whether it be statistically rigorous, like what you’re talking about, Monica, or be able to put something out there that maybe is a little bit more able to just see and be like, okay, you know, visually, even I can see this, or using some of the technology, like Ben was talking about, being able to parse those, those answers apart. But we appreciate you both coming on today.

Ben Turzinski 31:18
Thank you.

Monica Schauer 31:20
Thank you.

Will Fulwider 31:28
Thanks for listening. This has been Field Notes from UW Madison extension. My name is Will Fulwider regional crops educator for Dane and Dodge counties. And I was joined by my co host, Michael Geisinger, outreach specialist in Northwest Wisconsin for the nutrient and pest management program of UW Madison. A big thank you to Joe Ryan for creating our theme music, and to Abby Wilkymaki for our logo. If you have any questions about anything you’ve heard today or about your farming practices in general, reach out to the extension agriculture educators serving your region.