Documenting Producer-Driven Innovation in Field Crop Production

Agronomic research is important for improving the profitability and sustainability of field crop production. Production improvements are also driven by field crop producers through on-farm innovation. Using observation and on-farm trials, producers do the work of translating scientific findings into profitable and practical production practices at the field and farm scale. In North America, field crop producers play a significant role in ensuring that scientifically-verified practices like no-till/high residue systems and intercropping. are viable in production systems.


Often, such innovations are not documented and made available in a format where information can be readily shared. Social science research methods can be used to address this issue. However, social science research methods are rarely deployed in such a manner. This issue is not isolated to agronomy alone, as it has recently been observed by (Martin 2019) that there is a troubling lack of integration between social sciences and environmental and earth sciences.


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