Despite available decision-support tools (DST), farmers still want to know how much nitrogen cover crops and manure actually supply under their own fields’ conditions. In this CEROM-led project, farmers across Quebec are co-designing and running strip trials in their own fields, testing five N rates after cover crops or manure. Results are used to directly evaluate and challenge DST against field-level responses. Early findings show a measurable N contribution from cover crops, informing real fertilizer decisions. To learn more, read here.

McGill University is launching Quebec's first On-Farm Precision Experimentation (OFPE) network. Over three years, 80 farms will lead their own trials to optimize nutrient management, soil cover, pesticide use, and biodiversity, aligned with the goals of the Plan d'agriculture durable. By merging academic rigor with real-world production, the network aims to scale precision agriculture across Eastern Canada through high-resolution, farm-specific data. To learn more.

The DIFM project automates site-specific data generation to help farmers optimize decisions. Since 2022, over 40 trials have been conducted in Quebec across inputs such as nitrogen, seeding rate, biostimulants, fungicides, and cover crops, bringing the global total to over 532. Building on this, CEROM is launching a project to test whether management zones derived from checkerboard trials remain reliable predictors of input response across seasons, an approach supported Adhikari et al. 2023 on multi-year yield stability and gross margin mapping. Click here to learn more.

Following the special section "Advances in On-Farm Agronomic Research and Participatory Learning" in Agronomy Journal, led by Peter Kyveryga, this community needed a new opportunity to publish farmer-centric OFE science. The co-chairs of this community worked with Frontiers in Agronomy to create one. The call for papers for the Research Topic "Farmer-Centric On-Farm Experimentation Enhanced by Digital Agronomy" is now open, with a submission deadline of October 10, 2026. It welcomes contributions spanning agronomy, data science, and social science, from trial design and statistical methods to collaboration models and farmer-researcher partnerships. We will be featuring submitted and published papers here regularly as they come in. Learn more and submit your work.