Factorial Economic Planning Applied to Agricultural Experimentation

Innovation may be limited by the scarceness of resources, such as financial, homogeneous area, skilled labor or other research needs, for example the difficulty in experimental control of large areas in the field. In research areas such as chemistry and physics, designs are used in such a way that when compared to the agronomic designs, they result in a reduced number of experimental units, which in this work are called economic designs. Thus, the objective of this study was to identify significant factors and effects (p-value<0.05) with the application of economic factorial plans for agricultural experiments in the field. For this, two studies were carried out, the first comparing the 3k experimental designs with the full factorial, using the same number of experimental units for both, in order to evaluate the regression model. In the second study, the three experimental designs were compared, maintaining the number of repetitions and evaluating the influence of the reduction of the number of experimental units in the approach of the regression models. At the end of the two experiments, it was observed that the 3k design was able to identify the same effects and response surface similar to the control with a significant reduction (64) in the number of experimental units./p>