Yield Enhancement Networks (YENs) were launched in 2012 to support and energise on-farm learning-by-sharing and thus to enhance farming progress.
Through their initial decade YENs have been primarily focused on crop yields, but YENs now also address issues such as nutritional efficiency (YEN Nutrition) and carbon intensity (YEN Zero).
YENs let members share quantitative field-specific intelligence anonymously e.g. grain yield or soil health, so they can see how they stand compared to all others. The combined dataset from all YENs contains >2,800 crop yields so far, with >650,000 points of explanatory data. Entrants and sponsors can interrogate this dataset to hatch farm- and field-specific ideas about best enhancements. Farms and sponsors can then either modify their strategies directly or, where an idea is uncertain and common across farms, they can collaborate in robust and coordinated field-scale experiments, with results shared to hasten everyone's knowledge & progress.
There are an increasing number of YENs, including internationally. All YENs share a common definition defined here.
