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Onboarded in 2025. Immediately instrumented with side-by-side trials. A $44/ac variety advantage, a drone fungicide result worth expanding, and an honest finding that killed a $5/ac equipment upgrade.
The Challenge
A Western Illinois operation enrolled in Field IQ: Full-Service in 2025, its first year in a fully managed precision agronomy program. The operator had been running trials informally and making input decisions based on dealer recommendations and regional agronomic guidance, but they had no systematic process for running replicated on-farm tests, cleaning the yield data afterward, and connecting the two into clear $/acre conclusions.
The question heading into the first full season was straightforward: can a new client get meaningful, actionable results in year one, or does it take multiple seasons of data to get there?
What Field IQ Did
Field IQ enrolled this operation immediately into a full trial program in its first season — no waiting period, no ramp-up. Trial designs were built for variety comparisons, a fungicide application method, and a planter equipment modification that the operator was considering. All trials were run using the farm’s own equipment in its own fields, with strips laid out to generate replicated results at commercial scale.
Yield data from all trials was cleaned and analyzed through Field IQ’s full process, and results were delivered as documented $/acre findings — including findings that went against the product being tested.
The Results
A $44/ac variety advantage, confirmed across 22 strips. A corn variety trial across 22 strips showed one hybrid outperforming the other by $44.51 per acre, with an 82% strip win rate. A second variety trial across 17 strips put another hybrid ahead by $29.58 per acre at an 88% win rate. Together, these results gave the operator strong, on-farm-validated guidance on which varieties to plant in the coming season — not a test-plot recommendation, but a result from commercial-scale strips on this farm’s ground.
Drone fungicide application returned a strong first-year signal. A single-strip comparison of drone-applied fungicide against an untreated check returned a 17.05 bu/ac yield advantage and a net $37.45 per acre gain after application cost. Field IQ reported this as a strong directional result and recommended expanding it to replicated strips in the next season to confirm before committing it across the operation. The result is real — and it justifies the next test.
A planter modification was tested across 115 strips and never came out ahead. The operator was evaluating a ‘Hopper Throttle’ planter upgrade — a device marketed as improving seed placement and yield. Field IQ ran the comparison across 115 strips on three different corn varieties. In every case, the standard planter configuration outperformed the modified one — with the best conventional result showing a $5.34 per acre advantage over 33 strips. The upgrade was not recommended. The operator saved the cost of a modification that the data showed wouldn’t pay.