A trial that fails is still worth the acres

There is a strong pull toward publishing wins. It is also the fastest way to make a trial program useless, because a library of successes tells you nothing about what to stop doing.

A practice that costs $18 an acre and returns nothing is worth exactly as much to find as one that returns $30. On a 4,000 acre farm they are the same size of decision.

What makes a negative result trustworthy is the design, not the outcome. Replicated strips, one variable at a time, and the discipline to record what the season did rather than what you expected it to do.

We publish the trials that did not work with the same detail as the ones that did, including the ones where the agronomy behaved perfectly and the economics still went the wrong way.