Join the conversation between Garrett Moon of Moon Family Farms in the Horse Heaven Hills,
WA and Dr. Garett Heineck, Cropping Systems Agronomist with the USDA-ARS CAF LTAR
network research program. The interview dives into how they are working together on the farm
to answer questions about the ‘down-side production potential’ of perennial wheatgrass Kernza,
cover crops, and mapping cheatgrass in a region where fog counts as significant precipitation.
What are they measuring and what data matters from the research side and on the working
farm – and how are they making it work? Listen now to find out!
Carol McFarland
We’re with Garrett Moon of Moon Family Farms and Dr. Garett Heineck as part of the LTAR Research Network out here on the Moon Family Farms out in the Horse Heaven Hills here in Eastern Washington. We are looking forward to talking more about on-farm trials as research collaborations in answering questions important to innovation in the region’s cropping systems. Welcome both to our podcast.
Garrett Moon
Thanks for having me on.
Carol McFarland
Thanks for having us out to the farm today. All right, Mr. Moon, would you please tell us a little bit about yourself, your farm, who you farm with and more about your farming conditions?
Garrett Moon
Sure. Well, lots of questions there. I am a fourth generation family farmer and I farm on the ground that’s been in my family since about 1941 and we are 100% no-till on our operation. We are on some extremely dry and light soils, very windy conditions and so we have to be very careful with how we treat the ground. That’s what drove us to no-till and we’re always looking for ways we can do things that are environmentally responsive with some of the people who are downwind from us with growing metropolitan areas and just to try to find ways that we have minimum erosion and we can make the most out of the little bit of water that we get.
Carol McFarland
Excellent, and do you want to talk a little bit about who you farm with as part of your operation?
Garrett Moon
Yeah, so, on the family farm it’s my wife and I, husband and wife team. I do most of the outside farm work. She is my outstanding office manager and [takes] care of all that stuff and then we have a few at this point a few part-time employees and some seasonal help but it’s mostly just her and I running things.
Carol McFarland
Excellent, and Dr. Heineck, would you talk a little bit about your background and research interests?
Garett Heineck
Of course. I have been here in my current position. I’m a research agronomist with the USDA ARS now for two years. Before that I was at the University of Minnesota and then I was at Washington State University for a short while in a postdoc. my role here in the Northwest Sustainable Agroecosystems Research Unit is to study cropping systems throughout our LTAR long-term agroecological research site which extends across most of Eastern Washington, Northeast Oregon and Northern Idaho so it’s a very large swath and the Horse Heaven Hills is one portion of that that I’m very interested in doing research on. A lot of what I do is on-farm so I’m working closely with farmers across this region and I also focus on several facets as far as cropping systems. One of them is perennial grains and another is either intercropping or in the fallow region looking at different re-cropping strategies to look at alternatives to fallow which is one major interest that farmers seem to be trying to tackle here as I have conversations throughout the dry land.
Carol McFarland
Excellent, well, one of our recent podcast episodes feature Jesse Brunner and his re-cropping adventures up near Almira Washington so maybe he’d be a good person to follow up with in your research program.
Garett Heineck
Adventures abound, Carol.
Carol McFarland
You know,the name of the game is on farm trials isn’t it and there’s a lot of fun to be had in this cropping systems innovation. With that I hear you two have been collaborating around some on-farm trials. Would you give an overview of what you’ve been working on?
Garett Heineck
Absolutely I can. I can do the first I guess kind of foray into this. Garrett Moon was the first so we’re both named Garrett so that’s gonna be a confusing thing for this podcast. We’ll work through it, we’ll work through it. Garrett Moon was my first on-farm research collaborator that I made in Eastern Washington and I spend a lot of time in the Horse Heaven Hills working with Garrett on doing on-farm research. Maybe Garrett you could kind of tell them and fill your side of the story in.
Garrett Moon
Yeah so we met and I was lucky enough to meet him at the beginning of his time here and probably have been able to monopolize him a little bit because of that which is great from my perspective and I like what he’s doing and the focus of his project because it’s it’s so much targeted towards the dry dry land and this region that we’re in which has struggles that are unique but I think also applied to other areas and concerns with climate change and many other things so we are on the leading edge of it here when it comes to the dry country and I think that’s why we’re glad to have him.It’s been fun to to do work in the one of the driest rain-fed wheat production regions in the world simply because you know if you can kind of figure things out here it it gives you an edge in other places as well so I can it’s it’s hopefully a two-way street right like I’m garnering a lot of information from you and your farm and your experience that I wouldn’t be able to get anywhere else.Yes yeah things like the Kernza you definitely get to plumb the downside potential of crops and systems and things that you want to try by trialing them in the Horse Heaven.
Carol McFarland
Well, thanks for providing such a great service here on your farm. So, the rest of the region you know in the very dry- the very dry eastern Washington and this whole rain-fed grain region I think will benefit from the exploration. I don’t think we did actually mention how much your average rainfall is up here.
Garett Heineck
It’s a good question I think it falls around seven and nine inches is where they say and of course that’s widely variable and the timing counts for very much with that most of the reason that we’re able to practice it successfully here is because it comes in the right window in the wheat growing season and when it doesn’t it makes things a lot harder.
Carol McFarland
Okay. What is your rainfall timing then a little bit more?
Garrett Moon
So, mostly most of it is fall through spring so generally in the summer we only have a few kind of almost abnormal rain events and then the rains kind of pick up about this time of year in October We- our wettest months are probably December, and January, February, and then it tapers off through the spring but that’s the consistent time when the wheat’s growing and we’ve got the right mild temperatures to where it all just kind of aligns.
Carol McFarland
This is one of the warmer parts of the region isn’t it? Do you get most of your precip in rain or do you get some snow down here too?
Garrett Moon
We do get some snow but it’s nothing like in the more northern parts of Washington. We get most of it as rain or even fog but the snow that we get tends to be short-lived, I…it makes me nervous because we’ve got less residue, fragile soils I don’t like having large long-lasting snowfall events because we also get Chinook weather patterns where it can melt so quickly that it runs off and causes damage on the way out and it’s lost so I prefer what I prefer what our normal situation is which is to get it as rain.
Carol McFarland
You know I just really feel like I need to comment that. you know, you’re dry land when you’re counting fog as precipitation.
Garrett Moon
Water harvesting.
Carol McFarland
Well thanks for that description I know that really helps give give some perfect perspective around the work that’s being done here. So what you guys mentioned the the Kernza experiment is that the primary collaboration that you’re working on or do you guys have some other things you’ve been doing together and just talk a little bit more about the suite of projects you have going on?
Garett Heineck
I can speak to that a little bit Carol I I think it was the first project, the first thing I hauled in here to work on with with Garrett Moon was Kernza. Kernza is Intermediate Wheatgrass it’s a long-lived perennial that’s being directly domesticated for grain production that is somewhat similar to wheat in its quality characteristics and it was interesting because I wanted…I wanted to kind of paint a picture of how this perennial grain could be could be grown across our…our long-term research area and it was just a natural fit I was like well I can do it in the the Palouse or I’m like pretty darn sure it’s gonna work and work probably better than most anywhere in the country but like I also need to see what let’s test it let’s trial in an area that’s really gonna for lack of a better term, punish it right and see what it can do.
Garrett Moon
It’s true.
Carol McFarland
I’m sorry Garrett.
Garett Heineck
This is the ground.
And so that was the first project but since then we’ve we have expanded the portfolio we’ve done a few trials on a larger acreage also including things like remote and proximal sensing to see how that will work in looking at weeds, emergence, and incidence in your in your field as well as some cover cropping trials.
Carol McFarland
Cover cropping?
Garett Heineck
Yes so one one of our biggest challenges and Garrett and I have discussed it many times is just we are in a wheat fallow system because we’re so dry and it’s not the best system but it’s the only one that works and many of the challenges that come associated with the fallow with chemical resistant weeds and with loss of moisture the fallow is not particularly efficient but it’s just enough efficient that we can grow successful crops with it so I’ve been very focused on ways we can shorten or improve lessen the cost lessen the problems associated with the fallow period and that’s where the cover cropping comes in so a cover crop is a big expense for us but we’ve looked at ways and Garrett’s helped measure those ways of could we plant cover crops that maybe fix nitrogen could we plant cover crops that suppress herbicide resistant weeds that we’re struggling with could we plant cover crops that we potentially take to harvest if the conditions are right and just kind of looking at a holistic way to find to shorten the fallow.
Carol McFarland
When you guys started the Kernza collaboration and then how you know these other projects that have spiraled off from that so who starts asking these questions in your collaboration or how do the questions- the research questions come up?
Garett Heineck
Probably both of us, I would say.
Garrett Moon
Yeah, I think so.
Garett Heineck
Large degree and then conversations that we’ve had you know many conversations standing in the yard or it various times just kind of cooking up plans and back and forth on what he can do on the researching side and the questions I’m interested in and we come up with something through that.
Carol McFarland
Can you guys maybe speak to what a few of the questions that have come out that you are trying to answer among this suite of different projects you have going on?
Garrett Moon
Well, I think it’s it’s been interesting because as like an ARS researcher my job is to assume a lot of the risk right it’s like you don’t want to try something on you know 500 acres it’s better to let me try it and then and then fail so that that’s part that’s my job as far as I can tell.
Carol McFarland
Fail forward, I think?
Garrett Moon
We’re answering questions that’s successful but oftentimes it’s not it’s not the silver bullet it’s very difficult to get to get there and so as you know either I put trials in or Garrett puts trials in we can see those results real time or talk about the results after the data has come in in the winter and that naturally leads to progressively usually more research projects but also hopefully ones that are more dialed in to what will and will not work in this particular region.
Garett Heineck
Yeah, very much so,and I think fail forward is the perfect term for it because I was mentally reviewing the projects we’ve done together and a good deal of them were failures a good deal of the trials and things I’ve done on my own prior to working with Garrett were also failures but in every case I learned from those and you usually fail do a post mortem on it and come up with the reason why or reasons why that it failed and each time you hone it in and you get better and eventually you come up with something that works from that.
Carol McFarland
Those research questions just keep getting refined it sounds like.
Garett Heineck
Yeah, very much so.
Carol McFarland
So you’ve got Kernza, your weeds inventory and the remote and proximal sensing and the cover crops. What data are you collecting on these and kind of in that as well who’s who’s doing the work what scale are these trials on let’s hear more about these different projects details.
Garrett Moon
Part of the process I think too is learning how we like what what is possible for us to do research on and one of those is larger scale like strip trial type research you see these around long-term at various farmers fields and they oftentimes are very insightful but what I’ve learned is they’re actually quite tricky to figure out both what you want to try to answer and then logistically how how to actually accomplish that and so that’s one thing that I think we’re we’re working working towards but as far as and actually that that stitches in with the data collection piece they just asked us how do you measure data on such a large geographical area like I said a big strip trial say, obviously water is always a big question right how much is crop have to use how much does it use how much are you retaining during your fallow cycle those are all things so to measure that I use a little TDR moisture sensor that it accesses the top eight inches of soil and then little deeper neutron access tubes which can allow me to measure water much deeper down to four or five feet in the profile beyond that as far as yield variables right now up until now I’ve been stuck with hand harvesting or if in a large strip trial Garrett could go in with his full-size combine and combine off those strips but now I’m getting better equipped with smaller combines that should give us more flexibility and being able to do a little more robust research as far as yield data.
Garett Heineck
Yeah to piggyback off that I it’s been very helpful working with him because he can look at data much more precisely than anything I’ve been able to do in on farm trials before and a lot of times in farming you just we would be operating with a seat-of-the-pants feel which when it’s a slam dunk and something’s much better that’s great that tells you what you need to know and you can go with it but there’s a lot of stuff that we did that wasn’t there and so you know I might have felt that something was better but I didn’t have hard data to make decisions on and Garrett can look into the details of when these things happen as well which is important for us so he can look at if we’re trying to cover crop what the impact is on the cash crop that follows and also he’ll know the water that was drawn out of the soil profile over the season so we could maybe look at times for termination and things like that and we can really zero in a lot more precisely and that’s been very helpful.
Carol McFarland
It sounds like that moisture data layer is probably one of the most exciting.
Garett Heineck
That’s all we think about in Horse Heaven, is where the water is.
Carol McFarland
So I’m gonna go ahead and say most of this rain fed region. I did want to ask just from kind of that’s with the science geek hat on are you monitoring moisture continuously or is this like a single point sampling throughout the season?
Garrett Moon
I have a weather station that I monitor moisture continuously in a fallow situation so there’s nothing that’s planted immediately around my weather station. I have moisture sensors that go down to about centimeters or, I don’t know a couple…couple feet.
Carol McFarland
Using science units, Garett.
Garrett Moon
Two and half feet or something like that so that’s continuously monitoring precip and moisture and temperature things like wind speeds and directionality. Other things logistically it’s not possible for me to put that many sensors in the ground so I do time series measurements using a TDR little moisture sensor or a neutron meter which allows me to go much deeper but still it’s like a repeated measures time series type of data collection. Maybe once every month or every twice a month or something.
Carol McFarland
All right I’m just trying to get that picture so you’re coming out here into the plots with your sensors you know every, like you say, once a month and taking those measurements.
Garrett Moon
Exactly.Okay awesome well thanks for that and are you doing it across the cover cropping and the kernza both?
Garrett Moon
Well the the most everything gets the sensor the shallow sensor readings that doesn’t give us very much information unfortunately it’s just not eight inches of the soil profiles it’s not that important for a lot of a lot of the year and so I’m working on putting more access tubes in faster and so the kernza had quite a few access tubes we our strip trial project had some access tubes that went into deeper in the profile next year I’ll be putting more of those in the cover cropping but it’ll be very strategic it’s very time consuming so and also the machinery the hydraulics that are required to press holes that deep so I don’t have to do it manually is another but this is all tooling up to get this research going and it’s that’s one thing I told Garrett right away is like you have to be patient with me it’s gonna take me some time I don’t know what I’m doing so and he has been so yeah.
Carol McFarland
How long do you expect especially the so the the kernza trial with that being a perennial
grain how long that are you guys planning for that to be in place?
Garett Heineck
That’s a good question…
Garrett Moon
I was gonna see how you answered that one! “Well, Garett, maybe this will be the last one.”
Garett Heineck
As long as it takes to find out something useful I think would be my answer.
Garrett Moon
Absolutely. The plan is a minimum of three years and new plots go in every single year and they go in in the spring and they go in in the fall. It would be good to extend that up to five years and this is so this is like a long-term investment right like Garrett’s got to put up with me the researcher and I gotta keep coming out to the farm to conduct this research because it’s it takes forever right it’s a it’s a probably a three to five-year project so that that’s just the reality of growing perennial crops though we won’t really know if it worked or not either way we can answer the question but we won’t know for a while yet.
Garett Heineck
Yeah because we we have to wait for them to develop everything happens slow because of the lack of moisture they’re very similar the more I am around them the more I think of them as being similar to the conservation reserve program grasses that we grow because they just they’re very slow and weak out the gate and they take a long time to develop but then once they are developed they seem to be fairly rugged but again I don’t know if we’ll get economically sufficient amounts of them to do anything but through this long-term process I think there’s some opportunities for learning elsewhere because Garrett’s been able we’ve both seen the effect of seeding dates and seeding rates to some extent and so we can dial that in and learn some more things and I’m sure even if it doesn’t work here this is knowledge that he’ll be able to use elsewhere with the Kernza project.
Garrett Moon
And also when a plot doesn’t work when a piece of plot ground is right there’s always like opportunities to introduce new crops so on plots that haven’t the treatments that haven’t been working with the perennial grains this year I seeded in some like winter peas so we can see you know it may not be a full-on study but it’s still like we can look at something and there’s going to be something growing there which is also important we’re a very highly erodible area so it’s always when one door closes something else usually opens up.
Definitely
Carol McFarland
Nice. You know,this is a little bit different than some of the other on-farm trials episodes that we’ve done where your own on-farm trials when you’re working by yourself it’s like this is a question I am asking for my farm versus these questions that you guys are working to answer together these are more of a regional scope and viability question so I think that’s again that’s really cool and thanks for that and I’m interested in the configuration and how this looks as part of the Moon family farm I mean did you just give them a little playground and say good luck or have you been out there you know like on the tractor helping to seed some of these things or what does that logistically look like?
Garrett Moon
It’s been some of both. So, the first trial that we did I seeded and it was a PO trial that we did is a cover on the fallow ground and then in the meantime we got to the next season Garrett had tooled up a little bit more he has an area that’s on the back of the farm we kind of found a place that was conveniently sited for the kerns of trials and stuff that could be in longer term where it wasn’t in the way.
Carol McFarland
And where the neighbors aren’t seeing it?
Garrett Moon
That as well although the joke is you just want to put those right out where the neighbors can see them and just kind of air your dirty laundry but he’s got a spot that’s his essentially that he can do his own research on we do talk about what he’s doing back there but it’s really all under his control he goes back takes care of all the stuff I’m as hands off with it during the season as I want to be and then we also have coordinated on some trials that we’re doing elsewhere that are a little bit larger scale and so by my scale there’s still plot work but they’re large enough that they’re too big for true research plot equipment so those ones I’m seeding and spraying and tending and doing the other operations.
Carol McFarland
Nice so do you go out and look at the kernza of plots as part of your regular monitoring?
Garrett Moon
I don’t look at the Kernza of plots because things happen pretty slow especially over the summer there. I do see them when I’m working the fields and then occasionally we’ll check I walk back there and check them but it’s not a regular thing. I have enough to take care of.
Carol McFarland
I mean I figured but you got to ask see how see how curious you are in your scouting and monitoring.
Do you want to add more to about some of the data the design the logistics the research questions?
Garrett Moon
I guess one thing that I think we’ll be working on more of, I said previously about just trying to figure out how to conduct the research and what it- what that means right.
We- in order to we’ve got we’ve got one large field that we’re monitoring downy brome on it’s about what, 160 acres?130acres. It’s a large piece of ground and if you’re trying to find where the weed downy brome is and try to monitor that we’d like to be able to use it or monitor it using say a drone.
Well what does that take? I’m not an expert in drone. I think Garrett you’re…? No, sorry we’re both useless with that. So I go out and I find a collaborator who specializes in remote sensing and he teaches me how to do the proximal sensing and we’re just now after a year of that getting in data to say, okay we can fly a drone and or you know have someone fly a drone out there and we can start to map out where downy brome populations are and that leads again to just a future study and then what is the relevance of, that’s a fairly hot topic what’s the relevance of remote sensing in agriculture for weed mapping. Where does Garrett want to go out and run his Weed-it sprayer for example what would be the best place for that or to do a broadcast application.
So I think a lot of stuff takes so much time and this repeated attempts to try to get data acquired that is meaningful for the farmer and then also is, I can make sense of as a researcher it’s quite a dance.
Garett Heineck
It is and on the initial setups it’s quite the dance too I would add Garrett and I had a lot of back and forth on that because when I’m offering a field that I know has a known downy brome issue that I am trying to deal with and hoping that I can get some assistance financial technical and otherwise from him to put a product down that will help with that downy brome.
Then he as a researcher wants to do control plots and I as a farmer don’t want any weeds left. There’s all that back and forth on where and how we do that.
Garrett Moon
Well I just see what we did is I followed Garrett on the four wheeler and I just waved at him hoping that he would turn off part of his boom and then I don’t know we’ll see and sometimes you turn off the boom sometimes you wouldn’t no, I’m just kidding. It worked out really well so yeah it’s interesting to find a middle ground there.
Carol McFarland
We talked about this a little bit I know kind of the the yield and return on investment questions tend to be pretty important on a working farm.
And you mentioned your interest in the moisture like how are you each thinking more about the data? Dr. Heineck as as a scientist a lot of your job security depends on publishing papers.
And Garrett Moon I know as a farmer like you just you need to not go broke. And just like how you’re each thinking about the data and and how that affects your decision making going forward as as these projects continue to evolve.
Garrett Moon
I think from my perspective as a grower it, it allows me to be much more precise in analyzing things and to look at at multiple factors that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to, because the getting back to the fallow and the cover cropping.
That’s, that’s a very tricky one because the only thing that I can really measure is what the impact is on a cash crop to follow and the only way that I could really measure that in the past would be something like just looking at yield.
That’s one data point, but I can’t measure the potential positives did we plant a cover crop that maybe had that fix some nitrogen or did some other things. And with the tools that he has he can look at all those things, and then we can put some numbers associated with that and give us a full picture of what occurred, and what the potential economics of that would be. And I think that ability to find more precise numbers is very valuable for me and the questions that we approach and ask.
Carol McFarland
One of the things that has come up but other episodes of this podcast is in addition to the numbers which are very important in the economics it’s, you know, what’s going out but what’s going in and the effects on the soil and the time spent and so I guess, could you speak a little bit just on your farm how that looks for you.
Garrett Moon
Yeah, that’s another aspect of cover crops where things get tricky is just because we’re so dry. The economics dictate that we have to have larger farms and cover a lot of acres because there’s just going to be less return per acre, it’s just the way it is.
Therefore, all of our budgets are smaller per acre, we have to do more with less. And it’s important that we have a tight grasp on all these economics, and that’s why these, these questions that’s, that’s why things like the cover cropyield, if we were to do it fast we would just write off because the economics weren’t there on the, on the cash crop yield. It’s good to have other ways to look at them and see if we’re gaining and in other areas.
Carol McFarland
I appreciate that perspective. Thanks for sharing that. Dr. Heineck, do you want to talk a little bit about what data means to you.
Garett Heineck
Sure. So as you mentioned as an ARS researcher I have to publish a very specific quota of peer reviewed academic publications every year. And I like to do that so that’s good.
So data means that I, I can, I can accomplish that task so I can keep my job.
Carol McFarland
you should keep your job you’re doing a lot of other great things in addition to publishing papers so you should do that so you can keep doing all the other wonderful things that you do.
Garett Heineck
Thank you, Carol.And I will say too though, we were talking about three to five years with the Kernza.
Strip trials aren’t larger trials they take, taking years just to figure out how to do them. So even if we did have a short season crop, like a, let’s say like we tried, we tried like Teff, we’d read Teff we have millet out there sorghum all sorts of stuff.
Those are short season crops that we can trial, but it’s still a matter of logistics coordination and execution of that plan, along with the data that would lead to my personal ROI.
However, I really see- like what we’re doing right now in this podcast, what Garrett and I were doing over in his shop, talking. Those are also those experiences are also part of the research and there’s no one who can tell me that that itself is not data that can be harnessed
a useful body of knowledge to advance our scientific work. And so even though things may take three, five, tenyears.
The process of getting there itself I think is an ROI, as far as data collection goes. And so, yeah, I guess, data is important but also data that you might not think is data in a conventional agronomic sense is also very important to me as well.
Carol McFarland
Actually, I was just attending a conference and one of the things they highlighted was this idea of pluralistic ways of knowing. I was just on another interview, we just said it was like, when you walk into a no till field, you can that’s been in no till for a few in crop seasons. You can be blindfolded and tell the difference.
Right and that’s that’s different than the data that you can statistically analyze and you know and you know after generations on this farm this farm is part of your DNA like you know things that you can’t graph.
Garrett Moon
Yeah, it’s very true I was thinking of. When I first came back to the farm my background was in mechanical engineering. And, you know, it’s a numbers based profession, and I kind of wanted to use that much more than I do now and the way that I approached farming,
My dad is very opposite. My father farmed his whole life and was successful at it. that was right here in Horse Heaven where it’s not easy to do. And I would ask him these questions to try to get information that I could use to make decisions.
And it frustrated me a little bit at first because he could never really give hard answers but what I finally came to the conclusion of is my father had very much just internalized the feelings of all these things into something that was very amorphous but he could just walk and like he said about the no till field he could walk outside, stand in the sun, close his eyes, and just feel what the weather was like and tell you that it was time to go to work and start fall seeding and he would be correct.
It takes a lot of years of experience to get there of course but also data is useful but there are so so many variables and the unbelievable complexities of these living systems and how everything intertwines and the mechanical part of farming and the way the iron affects the soil and all these things and that’s where the true value of the experience and the knowledge on the ground comes from is someone that can bring that in and offer these tips and solutions and suggestions to the research. I mean the two interplay with each other very much.
Carol McFarland
Thank you for sharing all of that perspective and you know Garett as not as good of a scientist as you but still with some scientific training. So with some scientific training under under my belt I do understand, you know that the role of data and especially statistics in an applied ag context in particular can really inform that risk reduction, like, oh look, we have found this thing is more likely to occur when you do this thing under these conditions and you know, we can say that from a standpoint of it is more than just random chance that this effect occurred.
And so would you maybe speak a little bit more to that and then, you mentioned the Long Term Agroecosystem Research network, which will be, you know, here by referred to as LTAR.
And how, you know, as a collaborator working, working with you in that space with the cook agronomy farm site.
How is that long term research important, and how does this on farm experimentation complement the research farm work that’s done on the Cook Agronomy Farm in Pullman, and how those experiments contribute to answering these broader cropping systems innovation questions across the region.
And again, you got to remember to thread statistics and their relevance throughout all of that.
Garett Heineck
That’s a big question.I’m going to thread like a needle, Carol.
So I guess, first of all, I’d like to put it on record that the reason why scientists use statistics is just to reduce the number of arguments that we have. It sets like a limit like a threshold, right.
It didn’t meet the threshold we have to talk about that anymore.
Carol McFarland
Is it point oh five, or point one, Garett?
Garett Heineck That there lies another argument. I’m usually a point, oh five guy but it’s a- there’s a wiggle room.
Carol McFarland
Including in the field or just in the lab?