In the face of climate change, developing crops with higher stress tolerance and stable yield is more important than ever. One of the obstacles on this quest is the lab-field gap : many studies performed under controlled laboratory conditions are of limited predictive value for phenotypes in the field. We are using a new experimental design to study the wiring of molecular pathways and plant traits directly in the field, based on -omics and phenotype profiling of individual plants of the same genetic background grown in the same field. Uncontrolled micro-environmental and stochastic variations across the field give rise to molecular and phenotypic variability among plants, which we use to investigate which genes have an impact on yield-related phenotypes in the field. We focus on maize and rapeseed as model crops.