Ethnographic research: corn farmers, crop yield, USA

A company that supplies products and services to help farmers improve crop yields wanted to conduct depth interviews with corn farmers and agronomists in Illinois and Iowa. The research explored the opportunity to market new a digital solution deisgned to optimise the use of fertilisers in arable farming. The proposed product used satellite imagery to identify how much fertiliser is required on different fields or sections of fields. It was important for the research that the farmers who were interviewed represented a range of different sizes of farms, including some very large farms of 5000 acres or more.

We recruited over 40 farmers and advisers in two phases of the research. These represented four different sizes of farm:

• Small Family Farms ($350,000 gross cash farm income or less than 1000 acres)
• Midsize Family Farms ($350,000 to $999,999 gross cash farm income or 1000 to 2600 acres)
• Large Family Farms (over $1 million gross cash farm income or over 2600 acres)
• Very Large Farms (over $1.5 million gross cash farm income or over 5000 acres)

We also assisted with planning the travel schedules for each group of interviewers as the drove round rural Illinois and Iowa to conduct ethnographic interviews on last around 90 minutes on working farms.

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