URBANA, Ill. — When University of Illinois professor Manly Miles established the Morrow Plots in 1876, he couldn’t have imagined they would become the oldest continuous agricultural experiment in the Western Hemisphere. Nor could he imagine, more than a century before the dawn of the internet, that the plots’ data would be digitized and made available online to scientists, students and educators around the world.
The new database, which includes crop hybrid, rotation, planting density and yield as well as fertilizer type and amount, came to fruition thanks to the Morrow Plots Data Curation Working Group, according to a university news release. It’s an interdisciplinary team from the University of Illinois-College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences and University Library.
Data scientists and curators needed to find the historical data. That included an ancient notebook held by the department of crop sciences. They had to standardize it through time so that year-to-year comparisons could be made. For example, some data were missing for certain years and yield wasn’t recorded at all until 1888. But the working group accepted the challenge.
Prior to the database’s publication, Andrew Margenot, an assistant professor in crop sciences, fielded dozens of requests each year for the Morrow Plots data. Now he can direct those requests to the Illinois Data Bank.
“I’ve had requests from government and university researchers, both in the United States and abroad,” he said. “They’re mainly modelers trying to link weather patterns with yield and soil data; a lot of modelers salivate at the Morrow Plots data. We also get requests from folks trying to understand how their long-term trials compare with ours.”
The data also can be used to understand how soil fertility is influenced by management practices of crop rotation and nutrient inputs, and how that relates to yields. After discovering a trove of historic soil samples from the Morrow Plots and other sites around Illinois, he’s eager to analyze long-term trends.
The Morrow Plots started as an experiment to test the effects of crop rotation on soil quality. Along the way they helped establish a number of farming basics taken for granted today, including that crops require nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium; that hybrid corn can boost yield, especially when planted at close spacing; and that crop rotation can mean less need for fertilizers.
