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Crop Management: An Industry Perspective
Information is a valuable commodity to professional agronomists and crop advisors. Information is increasingly the product an agronomist provides his/her customers. Whereas agronomists of a previous generation may have considered themselves service providers (e.g., soil sampling or crop scouting), currently they are more often thought of as a source of accurate, timely information that is relevant to their clientele. Public institutions and private industries that serve agriculture have recognized the importance of delivering information to farm operators as a means of influencing and gaining access to on-farm decisions (1). The internet provides access to a wealth of crop production information in forms that have not been possible until now. Industry and universities have enhanced access to information and program delivery with new methods of serving clientele through electronic means. Most land-grant universities maintain some form of online reference library for crop producers and the professionals who advise them. A number of agricultural input companies have placed crop management information, decision aids, and product descriptions on their internal and external web-sites. However, a need still exists for a source of timely and credible reviews of crop production research information presented in a form that is attractive, readily accessible, and directly usable by professional crop advisors. Our scientific journals are not being read by practicing professionals, thus scientists are increasingly writing for and to each other. We believe that Crop Management can be a success in helping to meet the information needs of professional agronomists. This article outlines our support for this new online journal. Practicing agronomists need easy access to crop production information. Despite the growth in broadband internet access in rural areas, busy professionals do not have the time to browse numerous web-sites for access to the latest information. One way that Crop Management could improve the access to information is to maintain an interest profile on each user (subscriber) and send a periodic short e-mail notification containing appropriate hot-links when new information is published that meets the user’s interest profile. The utility of a web-site for a person seeking information is measured by how quickly she or he can locate and access the specific piece of knowledge they need. The information must be timely. Crop management information is perishable; a busy agronomist is most interested in information related to a problem currently occurring in the field. However, the same information may be extremely valuable at a later date and archived articles should be easy to access by topic and crop. For example, not many crop advisors are interested in how frost affects a corn plant until a damaging frost occurs. At that point of need, rapid access to older information can be as important as the current latest advice from regional or national experts. Information for crop production professionals must be credible. It must be free from bias and based on sound science. Online chat rooms may be full of information, yet crop advisors place a higher value on information from a university or company they trust. Finally, crop management professionals often value information that is directly usable with clients. Much of the scientific literature must be “translated” into usable language before it becomes meaningful to most crop producers. For example, the science articles in the CCA Advantage section of “Crop Decisions” magazine are excerpted from tri-society journals, and are re-written to meet the needs of an agronomist. Another example is an article published in the Journal of Production Agriculture (3) that was later re-written into a newsletter for agronomists (2). Most often, the key points from research articles must be synthesized and condensed by the agronomist into one or two paragraphs in an e-mail or written communication with a recommendation of action for customers. One of our colleagues at Pioneer used to tear out the interpretive summary “yellow pages” from the Journal or Production Agriculture, and recycle the rest of the publication. As former academics, we recognize that we probably put less effort into writing the summary for those articles than we would have if we had known that was the only portion of our work that was read by our intended audience. We would like to introduce a list of what we believe are the primary characteristics of an article that would be appropriate for Crop Management. This might serve as a “practicality” checklist for reviewers of manuscripts under consideration for publication. Checklist for Crop Management Reviewers
We applaud the Crop Science Society of America for creating Crop Management. We look forward to utilizing this journal as both a source of information and as an outlet for industry researchers to publish results of useful crop management research. There is value in having crop management research accessed directly by users of that information. A forum like Crop Management could promote mutually beneficial interaction between researchers and practicing professionals that utilize research results. We welcome and support the creation of Crop Management. We believe this vehicle and the technology that enables it will prove effective at meeting the information needs of agronomists outside the world of academia. We also thank the editors of Crop Management for this opportunity to share our thoughts.
Literature Cited 1. Carter, P. R. 1995. Future roles of seed company field agronomists and state university extension specialists. Pages 128-138 in: Proc. 15th Annual Corn and Sorghum Industry Res. Conf., Chicago, IL. Am. Seed Trade Assn., Alexandria, VA. 3. Randall, G. W., Iragavarapu, T. K., and Bock, B. R. 1997. Nitrogen application methods and timing for corn after soybean in a ridge-tillage system. J. Prod. Agric. 10:300-307.
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