Agronomics Analysis: Gauging confidence in crop yield comparisons

ADAS has developed a new way for farmers to test their decisions which it calls ‘agronomics analysis’

Agronomics web-site

Agronomics is the science of managing the ‘agronome’: it describes and enables comparisons of cropped areas by gathering, analysing and interpreting multiple spatially-defined data, often with farmers using ‘precision farming’ technologies.


Although not yet widely recognised, the most valuable attribute of precision farming technologies is their capability to assess the effects of land management decisions. On-farm testing is often carried out in ad hoc tramline or split field comparisons; but this has now been made much easier with the availability of precision technologies. Farmers’ trials tend to be ignored by scientists as they usually lack the randomisation and statistical analysis that would make them ‘scientific’. However, the huge replication provided by yield monitors and crop sensors now provides a new way of making high-precision scientifically-credible farm-scale comparisons.

Figure 1: A farmer’s yield map, showing the challenge of deciding whether low (L) and high (H) nitrogen levels really differed in yield from the standard (S) level.

ADAS calls this ‘Agronomics analysis’; it is described in full here