Purpose
Today, when farmers and their trusted advisors sit down each year to buy seeds, crop protection, and fertilizer, most do not have well-characterized performance data from their own fields to inform these decisions. Instead these decisions are based on regional performance data. Of the farming operations that routinely use on-farm performance testing, many underestimate the noise in their yield data, making it possible for decisions to be made based on noise instead of signal.
Instead, FarmTest envisions a future where all growers optimize their management practices based on statistically rigorous in-field performance data.
To enable this, FarmTest’s mission is building software tools that let growers easily measure which management practices pay off on their own fields. This includes software for designing, executing, and analyzing on-farm performance tests. FarmTest believes that when farmers and their trusted advisors have well-characterized performance data specific to their own fields, farm profits and farm efficiencies will improve.
Nick Cizek, Founder and CEO
Nick Cizek is an applied physicist specializing in precision measurement (Ph.D. Stanford, 2010). Before founding FarmTest, he worked for nearly 5 years at The Climate Corporation / Monsanto / Bayer Crop Science. Specifically, he led teams designing and executing in-field trials to measure the performance of advanced nitrogen management systems on thousands of commercial farm acres. He initially joined Climate to help design and deploy a sensor network to collect local data to improve the value of Climate’s predictive agronomic optimization models.
Previously he co-founded and achieved a successful exit from a grid scale battery startup (publicly, the patents are now owned by Google X / Malta). He began working on food, water, and energy security as a Fellow at the Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy (ARPA-E).