In July of this year, Cornell Cooperative Extension Service hosted their annual field day at the Robert B. Musgrave Research Farm in Aurora, New York. The farm is in the Finger Lake region of upstate New York, on the eastern edge of Cayuga Lake.

Gangwer mike
Mike Gangwer

Land-grant universities have been delivering field days for decades. The objective of transferring new knowledge to farmers is an extension of applied research conducted on public land using public dollars. Add to this the fact that researchers report objective analyses without the bias of affiliation to a company or a particular perspective.

The working model of a Cornell or Michigan State University or University of California – Davis is quite simple. Research is done to help landowners, farmers and ranchers better manage their farm business. This is a wide-net description, but the transfer of applied research knowledge to the public is an essential role manifested in huge strides forward in the agricultural industry.

Normally, the desirable flow is basic research done in the laboratory, applied research work done in the field, transfer to the public via field days, publications and the Internet, and then adoption by the private sector.

Further, one may assume that if the applied research work is done well, the private-sector industries will adopt this knowledge and build a business model based on selling a good or selling a service for profit. This happens when the good or service is tested at the university and is proven in multiple field trials over time.

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Here in Aurora, eight extension staff and their graduate students showed us their work. Some of it was a work in progress, a time trial of crop rotation, for instance. Some was a seasonal effort – a weed control project – and some was comparative, a gene study that seeks to control a particular pest in corn.

The Cornell staff describes the problem, shows us the experimental work that is field evidence, describes the empirical data collection and method, and then interprets these data into something the group can understand. At the core, the best field demonstrations are based upon relevancy to the landowner once he or she returns home. “Why is this important, and how can I adopt this in my operation?”

Certainly, large agricultural cooperatives and companies already have a robust research and development department. And they are amazingly productive. We support them. But they can have and usually do have a different motive: selling a good or service.

The field work they do and report upon is already biased toward making their good or service come out ahead. We all know this. And since we do, we can evaluate the results from the perspective of adoption over time and across a big landscape.

If a particular seed variety or kind of equipment or new piece of software is introduced at a trade fair or farm show, and several years go by and it has been adopted by many landowners across the large landscape, then it has held up to the best test of all … implementation on a wide variety of farms over a large area.

Who benefits? Every landowner does. Those adopting new technology are in front in terms of improving efficiency and economic return. Those who wait for these early adopters to try them gain because they are proven now, so the risk is lower.

Well-known within this model are the funding issues that challenge every university … not only the funding amount but the funding source. Organizations that invest in university research of any kind have a vested interest in the results. We all know this.

So the principal investigator, the university faculty member, must base analysis or analyses upon data as unbiased as possible. This is accomplished by using good experimental design, data collection and statistical analysis.

The operative words here are “objective” and “unbiased.” The public demands this, and here in Aurora, the eight field stations and demonstrations were science-based and not biased toward a particular company or perspective.

Much of the research work done is based upon where the funding sources are … that is, if the USDA is particularly interested in soil health via the Soil Health Initiative and has funding for researchers to work on this topic, then we will see the results of this effort at our field days.

Cornell University has ramped up the soil health/quality capability to help landowners understand the physical, chemical and biological properties as related to soil health. The assessment tool has a dozen or so parameters that, once scored, give a numerical value of overall quality. The landowner selects one or more parameters to change and thereby move toward improving soil health.

There is a lot of interest in soil health and cover crops across the entire world. The overarching effort is to mitigate the increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide by sequestering carbon in biomass or stabilization in the soil atmosphere via reduced or minimal tillage. We saw several cover crop trials in Aurora.

We know that a lot of the effort at once again looking at soil health and cover crops and carbon sequestration is based upon mitigating climate change, especially reducing greenhouse gases. Agriculture has a significant role to play, and the manifestation of that role was on display here in Aurora.

I have attended hundreds of field days and demonstration plots and farm shows all over the world, and at every one I learn something. For instance, Adapt-N is one of the new adaptive management programs based upon actual field conditions rather than general manufactured fertilizer recommendations. I did not know this.

The entire agricultural industry is best served with a mix of public and private investments. Here at Cornell’s Musgrave Research Farm, we saw the return on public dollars funding objective, science-based applied research work. Hopefully, there will be many more such field days in future times. PD