Progress towards sustainable intensification depends on effective exchange of knowledge and data between industry and academia. This requires engagement of both farmers and researchers, recognition that innovations can occur in the field as well as in the lab, and that researchers have as much to learn from farming and farmers as vice versa. A number of initiatives in the UK are recognising the value of farm networks for effective knowledge exchange and for asking questions of relevance on-farm; however the value for science is less well recognised. Uptake of digital record keeping and precision farming technologies is now becoming ubiquitous, giving new opportunities for farmers to share data amongst themselves and with researchers to provide new insights, but crucially also allowing farmers to make interventions in-field and to measure their impacts on-farm, for example by yield mapping. New statistical approaches are required to draw robust conclusions from this sort of data, but the authors believe its use could be transformative of agronomic science, so much so that we have created a new term to describe the approach; namely, ‘agronōmics’. The major benefits of experimenting in fields with farmers are; i) working at a relevant scale with the ability to test treatments not possible at the plot scale; ii) the potential to assess treatment interactions with soil differences (experimenting with soils is challenging with conventional plots); iii) the potential for greater precision to evaluate treatments with confidence intervals of less than 0.5 t/ha; iv) engagement of farmers, hence embedding knowledge exchange within research. However, it is crucial for effective knowledge exchange that farmers and researchers share the same concepts and metrics. ADAS has thus established the Yield Enhancement Network to allow both arable innovators and researchers to compare actual farm yields