Online Farm Trials

Online Farm Trials (OFT), a collaborative research project with the Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC), digitally transforms trial research information for Australia’s grains industry. OFT uniquely provides advanced spatial search and filtering functionality to enable growers, advisors, and researchers to rapidly find published research trials most likely to be decision useful. Spatial integration of other relevant location-based grains, soil and climate data from complementary national, state, and regional databases provide more comprehensive and relevant detail to support users in their trial search.
 

Online Farm Trials website

Background

Prior to the development of OFT the results of grains trial research were available via hard copy reports or basic electronic format, dispersed across and within different organisations. Information was difficult to access, and manual searches were time consuming resulting in farm trial research being underutilised and repeated. Consequently, valuable information was available only to a limited number of industry stakeholders.

OFT enables farm trial research to be accessed online and explored spatially via sophisticated filtering mechanisms in ways that are decision useful to growers, advisors, and researchers.

Outcomes

OFT enables online access to past and current grains research information on a national and industry-wide basis to facilitate practice change and improve the international competitiveness of the grains industry. 

Obtaining decision-useful information is significantly more efficient, saving time for growers and agronomists.

Access to legacy data reduces unnecessary duplication of farm trials, improving the productivity and efficiency of resources for grains research.

Impact research identified the importance of legacy and contemporary trial data in decision-making and the benefit in OFT providing direct access to these data. By making trial results accessible digitally, this enabled users to search for relevant trial information succinctly and expediently; it enabled the identification of trends in research trials, and the ability to undertake spatio-temporal assessments across Australia’s grain production zones.

Access to soil conditions and climate data provided by OFT in addition to the trial method and treatments, and results, was also identified by impact research as important companion data for decision making.
 

Innovation

• Spatial enablement and interoperable data exchange technologies allow integration of regional, state, and national climate and soil data from complementary sources such as the Bureau of Meteorology, the Soil and Landscape Grid of Australia as well as data from GRDC final reports and Source Trial Reports;
• Direct online access to trial research data in digital form with download capacity;
• Online analytical tools for growers, advisors, and researchers; and,
• Trial search - enables searching of specific farm trials data using advanced querying, filtering, and spatial search tools.
   

Online Farm Trials - Trial search

Technical features

• A flexible import system designed to support grower and research groups to contribute their trial data collections of varying format and structures;
• The OFT administration centre that supports data custodians (or authorised delegates) to add, remove and edit trial project data at any time;
• An embeddable version of the trial search interface, or ‘widget,' is available for contributors to use on their own website and benefit from the functionality and comparable data added by the OFT system;
• A trial result data API which allows developers to consume data via a public RESTful JSON service. CSV, Excel, and JSON export options are also provided for trial searches; and,
• Use of data interoperability approaches enables trials information to be supplemented with additional data relevant to growers (soil, climate, sensor, and other data).

Approach

OFT has been implemented using a staged co-creation approach. A pilot project in late 2013 guided the development of the OFT research tools and resources and included participants from three grower groups - Liebe Group (WA), Northern Grower Alliance (Qld) and Southern Farming Systems (Vic), as well as consultations with GRDC staff, GRDC panel chairs and other organisations (e.g., Kondinin Group in Western Australia).

Pilot groups provided historical trial data in various formats to allow the development of the central trial database and the OFT research applications. The International Plant Nutrition Institute and the Birchip Cropping Group also provided sample data for testing and developing the trial search interface.

The focus then shifted to scaling up the participation of grower groups and other trial research organisations by supporting them to make their farm trial data available for discovery and reuse. OFT currently contains data from 6,120+ trial projects (over 13,500 trials) from more than 80 project contributors - 85% of which are publicly available.

Future Directions

Search, visual and spatial tools are continuing to be developed in response to grower and advisor needs. Insights to user experiences from impact research have informed the OFT development roadmap.

The innovations developed for OFT have the potential to be applied to other food and fibre industries (e.g., horticulture, cotton, meat, wine, and dairy) to enable greater access to research information and improve Australia’s agricultural industries.