Spring 2025 – a completely different year (weather-wise!) 😊
Last year I wrote about how spring work in the fields was delayed for the second year in a row due to a lot of water in the soil. This year is completely different! As everyone has probably noticed, we've had a long stretch without rain and with sunshine 😊 This has made things a lot easier here in March, thankfully, because we’re clearly getting more field trials, and many of them are more complex than before — and that takes time!
Again this winter, we’ve had new trials where new suction cells need to be installed. That takes time, especially when some of the cells have to be placed in fields nearly an hour’s drive from Foulumgård. The good weather over the past month has really helped with this.
Emptying the suction cells also takes time. For the next season, we’ll need to build another “water cart” with a pump, etc., and we’ll also need to allocate more staff resources to this task. We now have around 1,750 suction cells that are emptied every other week, and there are plans for even more next winter.
So, what’s in store for Foulumgård in 2025?
We have two major projects kicking off in 2025. One is the biochar project, which the Danish Agricultural Agency has asked AU and KU to initiate. The trial also takes place in Askov, Jyndevad, and Højbakkegård at KU.
The other is the SmartField project. “Supersite A” is located here with us at Foulum, while “Supersite B” is near Selling, east of Hadsten, and is managed by the Danish Technological Institute (we’ve installed suction cells on that site this winter). You can read more about the project here: www.smartfield.dk
Our new Perennial Platform is also expanding this year. In addition to the main trial involving various perennial crops, we’re expanding with the PerennialTraits project:
PerennialTraits project
The increasing number of tasks also requires more staff. This winter/spring, we’ve hired three new employees (Sophie and Frank for field work and Bo for the electronics workshop focusing on SmartField). We’ve also had great help from Kirstine from the lab group, who stepped in as a maternity leave substitute in the dry matter lab.
One employee will retire in August, and we’re also looking for a part-time employee for the dry matter lab. So, we’ll be posting job ads again — which is nothing new at the institute these days!
As I mentioned last year, we at Foulumgård are definitely noticing that we’re getting many new colleagues who are unfamiliar with the workflows here — and in some cases, are not used to conducting field trials. The same is being observed by other field trial units.
Last year, we introduced a “Field Trial Protocol”, which is an Excel sheet where we request basic information — such as project name and number, who’s involved (with contact details!), project size (plot size and number), crops, treatments, etc.
Our experience so far is that it works well. If nothing else, it initiates dialogue about the project.
At the end of February, a seminar was held at Foulum titled “Experimental Design Days”, featuring presentations from statisticians from Universität Hohenheim and Rothamsted Research. Many of us field trial staff also attended. Not all of the statistical talk was very down-to-earth(!), but there were also some practical ideas on how to plan trials.
One idea from Rothamsted was that when planning a new trial, a small committee is formed consisting of the researchers running the project, a statistician, and a field trial unit representative. This ensures good dialogue about design requirements, while also considering practical constraints or opportunities.
At Foulumgård, we’ve already tested this approach on one of the new trials and will definitely try to use it more in the future. Our version is more pragmatic — it’s not a formal committee, just a couple of meetings where the involved people discuss practicalities. We can already tell it will save time and make the process smoother than the usual back-and-forth via email!
I’ll be stepping down as operations manager in May 2025, and one of my future tasks will be to improve communication between researchers and field trials at Foulum.
In addition to the new trials, we also have our “platforms” with more or less fixed crop rotations, where both major trials and smaller trials “overlap” the main trials.
We were curious about the number of students expected to start in September 2024. As you know, we didn’t quite fill the “quota,” but the students who have started are beginning to use some of our facilities. For now, it’s small greenhouse experiments and some work on our “Student Farm,” where we have various crops. The Student Farm is located on the land around the burial mound, centrally placed near the main buildings at Foulum. This area is also slowly being used in connection with visits to Foulum.
We try to keep our overview of links to project websites updated on the Foulumgård website:
https://agro.au.dk/profil/faciliteter/foulum
So, with a mix of “old” and new trials, we look forward to yet another challenging and exciting growing season at Foulumgård 😊
Jens Bonderup Kjeldsen