Agricultural Science Editing and Proofreading Services

A treatment increased yield by nine per cent. It was tested in one field, in one season, on one soil type, in a year that turned out to be unusually wet in June — and it will be quoted by an agronomist advising a farmer four hundred miles away on a different soil in a dry spring. Agricultural results travel further than their evidence, and the writing has to say how far they can go.

We edit what agricultural scientists write — field trial reports and their site-year structure, agronomy and variety trial publications, treatment and management description sections, soil, weather and season reporting, statistical analysis and its design basis, extension and advisory material derived from trials, grant applications and project reports, on-farm and participatory research documentation, livestock and grazing trial reporting, and guidance for growers and advisers. Our editors work on the reporting that says where a result applies.

The site-year structure is what makes an agricultural result transferable or local, and its failure is reporting a mean across everything. A nine per cent yield response averaged over four sites and three seasons conceals whether it worked everywhere or once. We work through these so results are reported by site and by year before they are pooled, since the pattern across sites is the finding and the pooled mean is a summary of it; so the seasons are characterised against the long-term average in the terms that matter — rainfall in the critical growth window, degree days, the timing of the dry spell — because a season is not a replicate and treating three years as three replications of the same experiment is the field's commonest overclaim; so the soil is described with the properties that determine a response, covering texture, organic matter, pH and any constraint, given that these are what an adviser matches against their own fields; so the management around the treatment is reported in full, including the variety, the rate, the timing, the previous crop and everything held constant, as a response obtained under one management system may reverse under another; so any site-year where the treatment failed is reported with the same prominence, since these are the cases that define the boundaries; so the recommendation, where one is made, states the conditions it assumes; and so the number of site-years is given rather than the number of plots. Reports written this way get used correctly by advisers.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including trial data, unpublished results and project documentation. We are editors rather than agronomists or statisticians, and we offer no view on treatments, results or recommendations. What we can do is make the reporting say where the result applies.