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Enhancing the value of field experimentation through whole-of-block designs

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Abstract

Precision agriculture (PA) offers opportunities for the development of new approaches to on-farm experimentation to assist farmers with site-specific management decisions. Traditional agricultural experiments are usually implemented in fields with the least possible soil heterogeneity under the assumption that responses to inputs and inherent variation of the soil are additive components of yield variation. However, because the soil in typical fields is not homogeneous, PA has much to offer. Farmers faced with variable conditions need to optimize their management to the variation over space and time on their farm, a problem that is not solved by conventional approaches to experimentation. New designs for on-farm experiments were developed in the 1990s for cereal production in which the whole field was used for the experiment rather than small plots. We explore the extension of this type of experiment to a vineyard in the Clare Valley of South Australia aiming to evaluate options to increase grape yield and vine vigour. Manually sampled indices of vine performance measured on georeferenced ‘target’ grapevines were analysed geostatistically. The major advantage of such an approach is that the spatial variation in response to experimental treatments can be examined. Linear models of coregionalization, pseudo cross-variograms and standardized ordinary cokriging are used to map treatment responses over the experimental area and also the differences between them. The results indicate that both treatment responses and the significance of differences between them are spatially variable. Thus, we conclude that whole-of-block on-farm trials are useful in vineyards.

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Notes

  1. Here, and throughout this paper, we use the term ‘management unit’ to denote that portion of a farm or field that receives the same management treatment (e.g. fertilizer or irrigation rate, tillage or canopy management). Under conventional management (non-PA), the management unit will typically be a whole field and sometimes may be the whole farm.

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Acknowledgments

This work was funded by CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, Foster’s Wine Estates, the Commonwealth Cooperative Research Centres Program under the auspices of the Cooperative Research Centre for Viticulture (CRCV) and Australia’s grapegrowers and winemakers through their investment body the Grape and Wine Research and Development Corporation. We are most grateful to Jackie Ouzman and David Gobbett for their excellent technical assistance, to Dr Dean Lanyon for his ongoing willingness to discuss ideas, and to the staff and management of Foster’s Wine Estates in Clare without whose support the work would not have been possible. In particular, the input of John Matz, Colin Hinze (now with Taylors Wines) and Dr Richard Hamilton has been valued greatly. The original codes used in this analysis were developed at Rothamsted by T.F.A. Bishop in research funded by the UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), project D20191. R. M. Lark’s contribution is part of Rothamsted Research’s programme in Computational and Mathematical Biology, funded by the BBSRC.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, PMB No. 2, Glen Osmond, SA, 5064, Australia

    K. Panten & R. G. V. Bramley

  2. Cooperative Research Centre for Viticulture, PMB No. 2, Glen Osmond, SA, 5064, Australia

    K. Panten & R. G. V. Bramley

  3. Rothamsted Research, Biomathematics and Bioinformatics Division, Harpenden, Hertfordshire, AL5 2JQ, UK

    R. M. Lark

  4. Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, 2006, Australia

    T. F. A. Bishop

  5. JKI Institute for Crop and Soil Science, Bundesallee 50, 38116, Braunschweig, Germany

    K. Panten

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  1. K. Panten
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Correspondence to K. Panten.

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Panten, K., Bramley, R.G.V., Lark, R.M. et al. Enhancing the value of field experimentation through whole-of-block designs. Precision Agric 11, 198–213 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11119-009-9128-y

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