Vol: 30 Page: 375

Authors:
Leszek Malicki
Agata Grużewska

Title:
 Production methods vs. agricultural experiments

Language: Polish

Keywords:
technology
production practice
agricultural experiments

Summary:
Agricultural measures used in field experiments did not differ from the ones applied in production practice only in the initial period of the formation of Polish experimental agricultural sciences. Technical progress, with the lack of miniature machines and equipment, brought about the fact that practice significantly progressed with respect to mechanisation, when compared with experiments. That had to result in incompatibility of the experimental results and those obtained on production fields. Certain balance between experimental techniques and agricultural practice appeared only in the seventies of the 20th century.
At present, however, technical solutions of the newest generation, with good prospects to become popular in the farming of the 21st century (among others in the so-called precise agriculture), will leave far behind the agricultural technology used on experimental fields. Of course, this in turn opens new vistas for experimental sciences. The new technology, operating with modern machines, DGPS, computers, etc. ensures an almost continuous monitoring of harvest and its distribution over a certain area. This makes it possible to prepare accurate maps of varied field environment. Thanks to that soil variation becomes congenial to the experimenter, making it possible to look for various relationships obtaining between various field conditions and experimental parameters.
However, in this way you get a practically unlimited number of empirical data. This excludes the possibility of using them for any known model of quantitative or qualitative analysis, especially when we consider the problems caused by their non-orthogonality. Consequently, there appears the need to work out new theoretical solutions in the area of mathematical statistics, possibly taken from the area of geostatistics.