Continued Improvements to NDSU’s Variety Trial Tool

The 2022 harvest is now in full swing across North Dakota. It is always fun to see how a season’s worth of hard work has paid off across a field. To get to this point, there are successes and failures along the way in almost every crop. This is the perfect time to consider the decisions and investments that went into the current crop.

Each year, the most impactful decision you make is which variety to grow. NDSU has an extensive statewide network of locations that have head-to-head comparisons of varieties across all major crops and many specialty crops as well. This information has never been easier to access and digest than right now.

Last year NDSU Agriculture launched a new Variety Trial website (https://vt.ag.ndsu.edu/). This site is a powerful tool that allows users to make variety selection decisions with just a few clicks or taps. Here are a few of the features that you will want to take advantage of:

• The site provides the same information you are accustomed to viewing in our PDF documents (and you can still view the PDFs if you like in the attachments section). Besides yield, this site includes information like maturity dates, plant heights, lodging, and quality factors.
• The data are now sortable! Take advantage of the ability to sort by variety yield, or maturity date, or any other factor of interest. This brings the most important factors to the top and makes it easy to find the best options.
• If you are a visual learner, take advantage of chart view. You can still presort the data, then view differences in the form of a bar chart.
• *Expert tip: sort by a variable other than yield. Then switch to chart view and select yield as a second variable to view. This allows you to, for instance, rank the wheat varieties by protein, but then visually compare yields to find the best combination of both. You could do the same with soybean maturity or pod height and yield.
• You can also use the compare tool to look at yields across locations. This allows you to easily sort information from a wider geographic region. We know certain varieties perform better under different conditions, but a good predictor for a given location is consistency across a wider region. Odds are that there is a testing location in your neighborhood already, but viewing multiples sites increases the confidence in the decision-making process.

The site is constantly updated with new data. We are also continually making improvements to the site. If you have any suggestions, please let us know so that we can improve our delivery of variety performance!  

Mike Ostlie, Ph. D.
Mike.Ostlie@ndsu.edu
Director/Agronomist