Team Effort to Tackle Trial Data
Large-scale field trials are the tried-and-true way to prove the effectiveness of a new pesticide under real, on-farm conditions, but one of the most challenging parts of managing trials is ensuring the quality and quantity of the data collected.
“The majority of the trials we conduct each year are run by our Technical Sales Agronomists (TSAs) in partnership with our retailers or farmer customers,” says Neelan Edbom, National Sales Manager at ADAMA Canada.
“Naturally, all this has to happen at the busiest time of the year for our TSAs and it’s pretty tough to ask them to drop everything and go out and collect field data when they have so many other things to do,” he says.
Edbom says that in any given year he estimates the TSAs are only able to collect about 20 percent of the available data from all the trials they are responsible for due to the time it takes and the territory they have to cover.
That sample size is in line with industry averages and ADAMA is happy with that quantity of data for products they already have in market. The company has a different standard when it comes to bringing a new product to market and for that they bring in a partner that has a whole new way of looking at trials.
INTENTional Data Collection
In anticipation of launching their new MAXENTIS® fungicide in the fall of 2023, the ADAMA team partnered with INTENT to take advantage of their FarmerTrials Network, robust data collection and software capabilities.
“INTENT specializes in field trials. We are an unbiased company that works with companies like ADAMA to trial their products on the right farms and get the data they needed to understand how geographic and environmental variables may impact performance,” says Pat Comte, INTENT's President of Canada.
At the heart of the INTENT trial system are the 1,500 growers across North and South America that comprise their FarmTrials Network.
“With MAXENTIS®, we developed a specification with the ADAMA team to define the type of trials – in this case side-by-side, 15-acre strip trials – the crops they want to include, the geography they want to cover,” says Comte. “Then, based on that specification we selected the qualifying farmers in our network to participate in the trials.”
Comte says that once the participating farmers are finalized the INTENT team walks each farmer through the details of the study and answers any questions prior to implementation. This hands-on approach removes any ambiguity and ensures each trial is done strictly to specification.
“We have a very high execution rate on these trials,” he says. “We work with growers that have really good geospatial data, which we then overlay with our data we collect during our field visits, the harvest data, satellite imagery, weather and soils to paint a picture of how those products are performing in the real-world environment.
From top to bottom, ADAMA was impressed with the quality of the data they got from the trial, but also the unprecedented 100 percent return of trial data from the farmers who tested their product.
“The quality of the data and the way it was presented really spoke for itself, but for us to also have that level of data from each of the farmers participating in the trials was unheard of, and really allowed us to prove this product in pretty much every corner of Western Canada,” says Cornie Thiessen, General Manager at ADAMA Canada.
Comte notes in addition to providing data, each participating farmer is asked to fill out a survey which is used to provide feedback on user experience, something the ADAMA sales team really appreciated.
“We were able to glean some important takeaways from the grower survey,” says Edbom. “That anecdotal feedback is so important because it all adds up to a better product – not just one that works well, but one that is maybe easier to work with.”
Having this one-two punch of quantitative and qualitative data meant Edbom’s sales team could confidently show their retailer and farmer customers definitive data sourced from their own backyard so they could be confident in their decision to use the product.
Changing the Game on Resistance
Following the success of last year’s MAXENTIS® trial and introduction, the ADAMA and INTENT teams sat down to plan this summer’s project – trialing a new herbicide that is being formulated to take on the top weed challenge in Western Canada, herbicide resistant wild oats.
“Our whole company is so excited to see the outcome of this trial project,” says Thiessen. “Obviously we wouldn’t even be going to this level if our small-plot trials and lab work hadn’t pointed to a winner, but when we get to see the results at the scale and detail that we do working with INTENT, that’s a real game-changer.”
Farmers can expect to see this new product, and its trial-backed data, in the spring of 2025.
