By Emerson Nafziger
A year ago I asked Illinois soybean growers and those who work with growers to help on a large project, funded by soybean checkoff funds by the North Central Soybean Research, designed to gather a small set of information on more than 500 soybean fields in Illinois for each crop year from 2014 through 2017. We appreciate that some of you provided information, but we ended up with less than a quarter of the fields we needed for the 2014 and 2015 seasons. This is a request for help in getting many more fields in the database.
The most useful way I’ve heard this project described is as a “search to find what we should work on next” with regard to soybean research. The goal is to have thousands of fields in a large database, then to see how soil, weather, and management interact to produce yield.
To help make it easy for people to provide this information, we revised the forms and Dennis Bowman turned them into fillable PDF forms, meaning they can be filled out and emailed back without printing. Or they can be printed and filled out by hand, then scanned and returned by email. The U.S mail will also work, of course.
We are also encouraging participation by offering a $50 gift card in exchange for filled-out forms. The gift card request form is included in the group of forms on the link http://web.extension.illinois.edu/csrec/downloads/67445.pdf – the form can be emailed or mailed. It would be great if FFA and college students could get experience taking part in a scientific study and also earn a reward for their efforts.
The forms include an example with some brief instructions, one form for each crop year (2014, 2015, and 2016), and the gift card request. Most producers or their advisers have enough information to fil these out a form (4 fields per year) in 15 or 20 minutes. If you have questions about this, or if you’d like forms emailed instead of downloading them, please contact soyncsrp@illinois.edu or me by email.
Thanks in advance for your help.