Again, my talk was really good and it felt like everyone was listening. The questions were more or less standard and can be expected when presenting this type of research to this specific IDA audience. There’s two things which I realised only after the presentation:

• First, it’s not so much the specifics of the modeling solution that I presented. The most interesting part for the audience is rather the fact that agriculture is turning into a data-driven discipline. I caught a lot of comments along the lines of „It’s amazing what kind and what amounts of data are nowadays collected in agriculture.“
• The other thing is that the specific modeling setup I presented is likely to be valid since the results obtained with this setup are the ones that would normally be expected. So, it’s not so much the result that REIP49 is the best predictor, but rather that the setup I created may be used for future variable importance assessment as new data come in.

I already guessed the first point, but the second one only occurred to me in hindsight. Seems to happen rather often in research, though.