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Farmers have the capability as they have never had before to critically evaluate management practices using field-scale replicated strip trials. Farmers have gained this powerful capability because yield monitors on combines enable accurate measurement of yields. Networks of farmers have become increasingly common to exploit the potential of yield monitors to evaluate management practices at the field level. Networks of farmers have also become increasingly common because farmers understand the power of evaluating management practices across many fields. Collection of results from strip trials across many fields requires protocols for data stewardship, that is, for data reporting, sharing and archiving. All farmer networks have developed data stewardship protocols. The protocols, however, vary from network to network, and the protocols are not easily accessible to people outside the networks. Creation of a standardized set of protocols for data stewardship that are publicly available would promote the formation of new farmer networks. More importantly, the creation of standardized protocols, especially for confidentiality and sharing of data, would enable the combining of results from many networks into one secure database. A combined database would facilitate analyses across space and time that would provide much more useful and robust answers to many applied questions about crop production practices, which would increase profitability and decrease environmental pollution caused by food production.