The Conduct of ‘Post-Mortems’ on Concluded Field Trials

Abstract

SUMMARY The design of field trials sometimes raises queries (which often go unanswered) about alternative designs and the best ways of allowing for environmental variation in the area allotted to the experiment. It is shown how recent developments in iterative methods for working out analyses of variance make possible the determination of error for systems of blocks other than the one actually used, and also for the row-and-column case. Some suggestions are also made for judging the error to be expected if plots were made larger.