WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Farmers at Purdue University are learning how to manage crops in the field using up-to-the-minute data.
Northwest of Purdue University’s main campus, a small combine cuts what appears to be random rows of corn, but a larger picture emerges regarding the crop.
“We’re in a trial here looking at some new short stature corn that’s coming commercially available,” Prof. Dan Quinn said.
“But we do a lot of work with fertilizers, different pesticides, fungicides, equipment management, planning dates. There’s a whole host of aspects that center around helping farmers manage their crop in the field.”
Quinn brings a group to this location each year—to a 1,600-acre living lab—to work, learn, and analyze.
“So a lot of our students actually have their own research projects that they lead, manage, do the data collection, all the data analysis,” Quinn said.
This harvest season, his students are helping with 50 to 60 corn trials, turning field notes and questions into answers for next year’s planting season.
“This trial that we’re standing in right now is actually in collaboration with National Crop Insurance,” Quinn said. “We’re actually looking at leaf defoliation and hail damage responses in short stature hybrids. So when farmers use it and they look at claims and yield loss due to something like hail, we were able to have the data behind it to understand what those yield impacts are.”
The group, which includes students and staff, also traveled across the state to test sites and farms to evaluate how August rain and flooding affected fields in eastern Indiana.
“We actually traveled to kind of east of Muncie,” Quinn said. “A team of us in agronomy spent a lot of time with farmers and consultants in those areas. So we were taking samples, we were taking data and trying to understand what the overall impacts are. We had research trials that actually were within flood environments. So that allows us to kind of evaluate, okay, what varieties, what management practices maybe did a little bit better when they had so much water versus others.”
Once fieldwork is complete, students inside the university’s Innovation Center turn corn kernels into data.
“Here at Purdue we have a huge facility that allows the students to kind of take those samples to get them in a format so they can analyze them in the lab on campus,” Quinn said. “But a lot of it has to do with the objective of the study, but a lot of it looks at disease, nutrients, and quality of that grain.”
The goal is helping Hoosier farmers plan ahead for next year’s planting season.
“There’s always new varieties coming out every year,” Quinn said. “There’s always new technologies, new fertilizers. There’s all these new advancements coming out, but we won’t really know how they perform unless we do them in the field.”
