21 Block and other designs used in agriculture

Abstract

Publisher Summary This chapter provides information on several designs that are currently being used in agriculture along with information on construction, published tabulations, and computer programs available for generating these designs. These designs include block designs, α designs, Latin square and other row-column designs, cross-over designs and split-plot designs, neighbor designs for field trials, and factorial designs and response surface designs. Incomplete block designs are used when there is one blocking factor and each block has fewer plots than treatments. Randomization of an incomplete block design is achieved by randomly allocating treatments to plots within each block. The blocks of the design are allocated to the blocks of experimental material at random. The first of the incomplete block designs to be proposed was the balanced incomplete block design. The method of differences is one of the most fruitful methods of constructing balanced incomplete block design (BIBDs). Resolvable BIBDs can be constructed easily from Latin squares and sets of mutually orthogonal Latin squares.