ABSTRACT
Intensive research occurs in almost all areas around the world, and re searchers spend enormous amounts of money, time, labor, and expertise un der different experimental situations. This shows the importance of experi mental design. Researchers also run their experiments to find out something that is unknown (Mclean and Anderson, 1974). For example, in agriculture, scientists deal with several factors that contribute to higher production in crop plants. Crop production is influenced by factors such as seed, cultiva tion practices, irrigation methods and levels of irrigation, rainfall, tempera ture, humidity, pests and diseases, soil types and soil fertility levels, sun light, solar radiation, farm management practices, different types of fertilizers, different doses of fertilizers, and also different combinations of two or more of these factors. Thus selection of a proper experimental design to meet the different objectives of an experiment is very complicated. Fur thermore, scientists conduct their experiments in different types of media such as fields, laboratories, and greenhouses. For example, in agriculture it self, there are many disciplines, e.g., plant breeding, agronomy, soil sci ence, agricultural chemistry, plant pathology, entomology, seed technology, plant physiology, economics, agricultural engineering, horticulture, vegeta ble crops, plantation crops, spices, fisheries, forestry, animal science, feeds and fodders, food science, agricultural extension, agricultural statistics, plant biochemistry, agricultural biotechnology, genetics, bioinformatics, etc. At present, interdisciplinary research is being done to tackle several problems at once to save time and expenditure. For example, in the plant breeding and genetics area, breeders conduct research on the evaluation of varieties for high yield, wide adoptability, resistance to specific factors such as pests and diseases, cold, temperature, soil salinity, water-logging condi tions, drought conditions, cropping systems, grain quality, nutritional val ues, etc., in collaboration with other specialist scientists. Agronomists con centrate on time of sowing/planting, seed rate, spacing, doses of fertilizers and methods of application to different crops, water requirements, irriga tion methods, weed control, land utilization (farm management), crop rota-
tion, multiple cropping, mixed cropping, cropping systems, harvesting tech niques, etc.
