Agronomic research provides management recommendations based on small-plot trials (SPTs) and on-farm trials (OFTs) with very different characteristics. SPTs are traditionally conducted at agricultural experiment stations by research institutes or universities, while OFTs are conducted under commercial-scale conditions and managed by farmers using their own equipment. Several researchers claimed that discrepancies could occur between these two types of trials, which can make the extrapolation of results from SPTs to the farm level difficult. In our study, we conducted an extensive comparison of small-plot and on-farm trials to analyze the effect of foliar fungicide application on maize and soybean yields. We collected data on maize and soybean from five US states. Analysis of the soybean data showed similar mean yield responses and within-trial standard deviation to fungicide application between 479 OFTs and 83 SPTs. For maize, our comparison of 300 OFTs and 114 SPTs showed similar mean yield response in both. Nevertheless, the within-trial standard deviation was three times smaller in on-farm compared to small-plot trials. On the other hand, the between-trial standard deviation (measuring the variability of the effects of fungicide application across different environments) was almost twice as large in SPTs than in OFTs for both crops. Hence, the differences in the effects of fungicide on yield were similar whether they were estimated using OFTs or SPTs for both crops. This implies that OFTs can potentially detect significant yield differences with fewer replicates and thus reduce the cost of data generation. We argue that SPTs can be seen as a preliminary step before scaling up to OFTs to facilitate technology transfer and extrapolate the results in real farming conditions.

农艺研究基于小块试验 (SPT) 和农场试验 (OFT) 提供了具有非常不同特征的管理建议。SPT 传统上由研究机构或大学在农业试验站进行，而 OFT 则在商业规模条件下进行，由农民使用自己的设备进行管理。一些研究人员声称，这两种类型的试验之间可能会出现差异，这使得将 SPT 的结果外推到农场水平变得困难。在我们的研究中，我们对小块试验和农场试验进行了广泛比较，以分析叶面杀菌剂对玉米和大豆产量的影响。我们从美国五个州收集了有关玉米和大豆的数据。对大豆数据的分析表明，479 个 OFT 和 83 个 SPT 对杀菌剂应用的平均产量反应和试验内标准偏差相似。对于玉米，我们对 300 个 OFT 和 114 个 SPT 的比较显示两者的平均产量反应相似。然而，与小块试验相比，农场试验的试验内标准偏差小三倍。另一方面，两种作物的 SPT 试验间标准偏差（衡量杀菌剂在不同环境中应用效果的变异性）几乎是 OFT 的两倍。因此，无论是使用两种作物的 OFT 还是 SPT 估计，杀菌剂对产量影响的差异是相似的。这意味着 OFT 可以通过更少的重复检测到显着的产量差异，从而降低数据生成的成本。我们认为，SPT 可以被视为扩大到 OFT 之前的初步步骤，以促进技术转让并在实际农业条件下推断结果。