History of the Statistical Design of Agricultural Experiments
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ARLY APPROACHES TO AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENTS One of the first described experiments is a feeding experiment given in the Bible, Old Testament, Book Daniel, verses 1–16. The king of Babylon Nebuchadnezzar besieged the Judah kingdom. Four Israelites young men from the royal family, without any physical defect, handsome, were chosen to serve in the king’s palace. The king ordered the chief of his court officials to give them a daily amount of food and wine from the king’s table. But this food was not according to the food laws of the Israelites. Daniel asked the chief official for permission to test them for ten days and give them nothing but vegetables to eat and water to drink. At the end of the ten days they looked healthier and better nourished than any of the young men who ate the royal food. Then, the chief official gave them vegetables and water further on. This paper is concerned mainly with the development of agricultural experimentation from a European viewpoint. There has been continuous improvement of farming in China,
L. R. Verdooren (B) Danone Nutricia Research, Utrecht, The Netherlands (E-mail: [email protected]). © 2020 International Biometric Society Journal of Agricultural, Biological, and Environmental Statistics https://doi.org/10.1007/s13253-020-00394-3
L. R. Verdooren
India, and other Asian countries for thousands of years although formal “scientific” methods were perhaps not used until recently. In Wikipedia (2019a) the British Agricultural Revolution is described. Major developments and innovations are: (1) Crop rotation. The farmers in Flanders (in part of France and current day Belgium) discovered a still more effective four-filed crop rotation system, using turnips and clover (a legume) as forage crops to replace the 3-year crop rotation. (2) The Dutch and Rotherham swing (wheel-less) plough. The Dutch acquired the irontipped, curved mouldboard, with adjustable ploughing depth from the Chinese in the early seventeenth century. It has the advantage that it can be pulled by one or two oxen compared to the six or eight needed for the heavy wheeled northern European plough. British improvements included Joseph Foljambe’s cast iron plough (patented 1730), which combined an earlier Dutch design with a number of innovations. By the 1760s Foljambe was making large numbers of those ploughs in a factory outside of Rotherham. (3) Enclosure. In Europe, agriculture was feudal from the Middle Ages. The Black Death accelerated from 1348 onwards the breakup of the feudal system in England. (4) Development of a national market. (5) Transportation infrastructures. (6) Land conversion, drainage, and reclamation. The British Agricultural Revolution was aided by land maintenance advancements in Flanders and the Netherlands. (7) Rise in domestic farmers. (8) Selective breeding of livestock. Wikipedia (2019b) described that Thomas Coke, 1st Earl of Leicester (1754–1842), who was a British politician and agricultural reformer, introduced selective breeding for sheep. The most common sheep in the area of Norf
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