A destructive biomass cut gives one number, on one date, from a sample that no longer exists. It cannot show when a treatment effect appears, how long it lasts or whether it fades before harvest, and the noise of soil and micro-climate is baked into that single value.
PhenoScale flights repeated through the season measure Mean Plant Height, Green Cover and Plant Biovolume on every plot, treated and untreated alike. Cloverfield assembles the flights into a biomass accumulation curve per modality and compares them statistically.
The true treatment effect is isolated from field noise, and the moment it appears and fades is quantified. Multi-station wheat trials run with Arvalis and sugarcane strip trials with twelve modalities have been analyzed this way, with no destructive sampling at any point.