Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

On-Farm Research In A Decentralized Information Model Or Grassroots Statistics, Derrick N. Exner, Jennifer Kendall, Dick Thompson

Conference on Applied Statistics in Agriculture

Practical Farmers of Iowa (PFI) is an organization that seeks to provide interactive methods of relaying information through farmer-to-farmer sharing (farm field days, workshop discussions, networking) and the generation of new information. On-farm research (OFR) is an important information-generating activity of this group. PFI has shown that key to doing research on farms lies in combining practical protocols with the statistician's old familiar friends - replication and randomization.

We provide background on PFI and how PFI cooperators carne to using strip plots and paired comparisons to answer fundamental questions about what to do on their individual farms. We discuss the …