A Digital Agronomy Approach to Farmer-Centric On-Farm Soil Health Experimentation in New York Grain Systems

Soil health is foundational to the long-term productivity and resilience of Northeast farming systems, yet farmers working in grain and cover crop rotations often lack accessible, farm-specific data to guide management decisions around cover crop selection, tillage, and soil organic matter. Existing research provides general guidance, but it rarely captures the variability in soils, climate, and management that defines farming in New York and the broader Northeast. As a result, farmers experiment on their own terms but without the analytical support needed to learn reliably from those experiments.

This project will use digital agronomy to enhance and de-risk farmer-led on-farm experimentation (OFE) focused on soil health practices in grain and cover crop systems, including corn, soybean, and wheat rotations. The central hypothesis is that combining farmer-led experimentation with systematic data collection and analysis can generate farm-specific, actionable knowledge about cover crop species and mixtures, tillage and soil disturbance, and soil organic matter and nutrient dynamics, while building a multi-farm network that reveals broader trends across the region.

A network of at least ten New York farms will be recruited, with each farmer designing and conducting their own experiment according to their own interests, equipment, and capacity. The Farmers Data Lab at Cornell University will support each farm by collecting agronomic, environmental, and remote sensing data alongside the farmer's own trial, organizing the data into a shared database, and generating both farm-level and network-level results reports. Field equipment is owned by the lab, sample analysis costs are covered in the project budget, and graduate student effort is supported through Cornell teaching assistantships and existing grant funding. Farmers and the project team will then interpret results together in a collaborative workshop, connecting individual outcomes to regional patterns and planning subsequent rounds of experimentation.

Results will be shared through farm-level reports delivered directly to each participating farmer, a synthesis report summarizing network-wide findings, a network-level results workshop and extension publications targeting New York grain farmers and agricultural service providers. This project aligns with SARE's legislative priorities by directly working to maintain and enhance soil quality and productivity, conserve natural resources, and support the economic viability of Northeast farming operations.