Abstract On‐farm experimentation (OFE) data, when aggregated across years and locations, is rich with information that enhances agricultural science and informs more specific management recommendations. Standardizing collection of metadata within an OFE network augments the traditionally measured data (e.g., population, yield) to enable broader comparisons that may be impractical at the field level. This paper evaluates the utility of aggregated OFE data in informing agronomic recommendations, investigates potential state and regional agronomic analyses, and illustrates how integrating OFE data with complementary data sets (e.g., historical weather conditions) can help identify potential contributions to agronomic variability across the region of study and elucidate additional research inquiry. Seven years of OFE‐derived data and associated metadata were aggregated to explore the analytical power of this type of integrative approach. The exploration of this dataset identified planting date and relative maturity as the strongest predictors of yield variability for corn and soybeans. Regional differences in corn yield response to fungicide application were also observed. This paper demonstrates how incorporating spatially and temporally complete historical weather data at sub‐seasonal levels with OFE data enables additional analysis that could lead to a better understanding of the environmental factors that influence crop performance. Standardizing metadata collection and aggregating data from OFE offer significant opportunities for advancing agronomic learning. These examples highlight the potential of integrating data collected across a diverse range of environmental conditions and management practices to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the interactions among these variables and their effects on crop yield and profitability.
Hawkins et al. (Thu,) studied this question.