The International Conference for On-farm Precision Experimentation will bring together farmers, crop consultants, and professional agricultural researchers interested in working with precision agricultural technology to conduct meaningful agronomic field trials on farmers’ own fields, and then using the data generated to improve farm profits and enhance farm sustainability. The four-day conference will be comprised of two two-day symposiums, and conference attendees may register for and attend either one or both.
After a pre-conference Welcome and “Meet ‘n’ Greet” on the evening of January 7, the conference’s first symposium will be held on January 8th and 9th and be called “OFPE in Practice.” The symposium will focus on teaching attendees to use the Data-Intensive Farm Management (DIFM) Project’s cloud-based OFPE software and database system to design field trials for farmers’ own fields, to generate, store, and manage the data that come from the trials, and then draw input management insights from the data generated. Attendees will hear presentations from farmers, farm managers, and professional farm management advisors from across the USA and other countries, who will discuss their experiences with OFPE. All attendees will also participate in approximately eight hours of hands-on training in using DIFM’s database and software system to design OFPEs, put them “in the ground,” harvest, and store the resultant data in their own secure databases on the Oracle Cloud, and use DIFM’s “decision tools” to gain insights into the experiments’ results.
The symposium “OFPE in Professional Research” will take place on January 10th and 11th, the second two days of the conference, and will be part of the Annual Meeting of the NC-1210 research project Frontiers in On-farm Experimentation. While all conference attendees are welcome to attend, discussions will be focused on formal academic research into highly technical aspects of OFPE.
All conference attendees are welcome at both symposiums. Professional researchers will be able to gain important insights into the practicalities of OFPE at the first symposium, and farmers and their advisors may find several of the formal research presentations made in the second symposium interesting, and will be able to contribute “real-world” insights into the discussions. But separate registration fees will be charged for each symposium attended.
