132850Agronomic Big Data Analytics for improved crop managementClosedBEIS-Funded ProgrammesISCFAgricultural systems are complex, and must be managed if we are to achieve food security and maintain environmental quality. The management of complex systems in industry and commerce is being improved by the collection, processing and analysis of "big data" sets. For some years farmers have had the potential to collect big data sets on their crops and soils using GPS-driven monitors on the combine or tractor, data from satellite-borne sensors and the direct sampling and analysis of soils. This raises the question of whether agriculture can enter the big data era in order to solve management problems more quickly and robustly than through the conventional approach of field trials at a limited number of experimental sites. We contend that this is possible, but only by using methods to analyse the data that are biologically meaningful rather than by blindly mining data for correlations. This is a feasibility study to test two tailored big-data analytical methods on a large data