Geeking out on farming

There are many big claims in agricultural research. That GMOs are higher yielding than non-GMOs, that biochar is the next best thing, or that intercropping is the way to go. Many of these claims are supported by individual syntheses, each with thousands of individual experimental or quasi-experimental paired observations of the impact of treatments on crop yields or other outcomes measured against controls.

These data sets are scattered across the literature and the strength of the evidence for, or against, a given intervention across different locations in the world is often masked in…