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.