What Works On Your Farm? | Nick Cizek of FarmTest | Mike Castellano of Iowa Nitrogen Initiative

FarmTest: https://farmtest.ag/

Iowa Nitrogen Initiative: https://www.agron.iastate.edu/portfolio/iowa-nitrogen-initiative/

Today’s episode is a really unique concept and potential game-changer for how we think about on-farm technology, management practices and research. Historically, universities and agribusinesses would conduct randomized controlled trials for the best data on how products work. But these trials are limited on where they can take place and how many replications could take place, so when a farmer says “what about MY field and MY management?” it’s not surprising that the bottom line comes down to: your results might vary. But we don’t know for sure or by how much. 

But with advancements in technology, why can’t every field include some sort of trial to understand how that product is performing? This has been done in the past with check strips that a farmer would plant as sort of a control, but this is far from precise or scientific. 

It just so happens that Nick Cizek is a bit of an expert in precision measurement and experimentation design, and he has created in FarmTest a way from farmers, their advisors, input companies and researchers to run real experiments on farm without interfering with a farmers operation. They are essentially increasing the scientific rigor of on-farm trials while removing the hassle factor. And today we talk to Nick about that as well as a user of the product: Dr. Mike Castellano of Iowa State University and the Iowa Nitrogen Initiative which conducted 270 unique on-farm trials last year to analyze nitrogen applications. He says that current university nitrogen recommendations are very coarse and really only differ based on broad geographies and whether the crop is after corn or soybeans, but with this data they are already finding consistently predictable differences in fertilizer requirements based on other important factors like soil type, crop residue management, and drainage.

This has big ramifications not just for research but for optimizing individual farm management practices and determining which inputs and technologies should be utilized and where and how much. Obviously this also could be very handy for input companies to more accurately represent their products because in agriculture the honest answer to “does it work?” is “it depends.” 

Nick Cizek is an applied physicist specializing in precision measurement (Ph.D. Stanford). Before founding FarmTest in 2019, he worked for 4.5 years at The Climate Corporation / Monsanto / Bayer Crop Science. Specifically, he led teams designing and executing in-field trials to measure the performance of advanced nitrogen management systems. He initially joined Climate to help design and deploy a sensor network to collect local data to improve the value of their predictive agronomic optimization models. FarmTest envisions a future where all farms optimize their management practices based on statistically rigorous in-field performance data. 

FarmTest builds software tools to automate on farm performance testing on commercial farms. We help researchers and growers design and analyze statistically robust field trials using commercial farm equipment. We make this easy by embedding product trials in variable rate prescriptions that account for all the nuances of each growing operation's fields, equipment, and management practices, and all the randomization, replication, and blocking needed for a statistically sound trial that produces a usefully small least significant difference.

Dr Mike Castellano’s work aims to increase the productivity, profitability, and environmental performance of crop production. To achieve these outcomes, he uses a systems approach and strong collaborations with a range of scientists and engineers to track the storage and flow of nutrients, energy, and water throughout the crop-soil system. A range of stakeholders including government, NGOs, farmers, and industry regularly engage Mike to help advance sustainable crop production and soil management. His research has led to several public-private partnerships that benefit agriculture and the environment. Mike currently serves as the U.S. representative to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Technical Panel on Soils. 

In 2022, Mike co-founded the Iowa Nitrogen Initiative (INI) with Sotirios Archontoulis, which leverages the latest advances in precision agriculture and collaborations with farmers to transform the scale of agricultural research. In 2023, the INI executed more than 300 unique experiments in collaboration with more than 70 farmers. Data from these experiments will enable university scientists and engineers to use the latest advances in data science to transform information for decision making about nitrogen management.