How Do I Determine If A Product Works?

Beleive it or not, crop consultants like us get just as many sales calls on us as you get on your farm.  How do we determine what will be right for our customers and what do we look for to make sure it's reputable?

We use the solutions approach to agronomy, meaning that we are more interested in solving a problem and getting to higher yields by better management than we are in selling you more stuff to get to higher yields.  You will hardly ever hear me say that if you use product X you will get 3-5 bushels more yield per acre.  We look to see if a product solves a problem that we have, or helps us with a management aspect like Nitrogen leaching.  An important thing to think about before looking at a product to solve a problem, is that the root of your problem may be management related.  If product Y makes a nutrient more available and will potentially increase yields in a deficient environment, you may be better served solving the nutrient defieciency instead of adding a product to take away more of it.

When we are looking at a new product what I need is a reasonable scientific explanation of how the product works.  I want to see a process on what the product does to work.    Just saying "it's pretty scientific" isn't enough for me and shouldn't be for anyone (it happens more often than it should). 

The next thing I want is university data, and I want the entire trial they are using data from.  Just because they were in the trial and one of the plots showed positive yield responses doesn't mean that it wasn't an outlier.  It's very often that a questionable product will state that in this university trial we had a 7 bushel yield response, but what they don't show is that the other 3 trials were not statistically significant. 

I also want to know if the results are repeatable.  Can I take this into a lab setting and consistently get the same results?  Produtcts like Agrotain are great examples.  If you haven't you should take Urea and put it in a jar with soil and then put some in another jar, but coat this urea with Agrotain.  The ammonia that comes off the untreated is immense and a very good "real" display of the product working. 

After all of this is met, we typically will take any new product to some field trials and try it ourselves on a few acres for a year.  I realize this may be a little bit methodical, but it has helped us keep from jumping on bandwagons and using products that are later proven to not work (see Nutrisphere N and Dr. David Franzen's research http://www.ndsu.edu/fileadmin/soils/pdfs/sf1581.pdf).